Step into your witchy power or be swallowed by the curse– the choice is yours.

A queer, feminist spin on Stephen King’s The Mist, this ode to female-rage is a perfect pick for fans of She Is a Haunting, and a reminder that if “boys will be boys”, girls will fight back. 

For high school senior Nell and her friends, a vacation house on a private Florida island sounds like the makings of a dream spring break. But Nell brings secrets with her—secrets that fuse with the island’s tragic history, trapping them all with a curse that surrounds the island in a toxic, vengeful mist and the surrounding waters with an unseen, devouring beast.

Getting out alive means risking her friendships, her sanity, and even her own life. In order to save herself and her friends, Nell will have to face memories she’d rather leave behind, reveal the horrific truth behind the encounter that changed her life one year ago, and face the shadow that’s haunted her since childhood. 

Easier said than done.

But when Nell’s friends reveal that they each brought secrets of their own, a solution even more dangerous than the curse begins to take shape.

Reading like a YA feminist spin on Stephen King’s The Mist, So Witches We Became is a diverse, queer horror about female friendship, the emotional aftermath of surviving assault, and how to find power in the shadows of your past.

Pub Date 23 July 2024
So Witches We Became
Jill Baguchinsky

So Witches We Became bit off more than it could chew and ultimately fails to deliver on the spooky promises of its back copy.

It’s revealed early on that Nell suffered from sleep paralysis as a child in response to the trauma of her mother abandoning her and the parts detailing Nell’s sleep demon are truly terrifying.

In fact, all of the horror sections are the kind of scenes that keep you up all night, making sure your feet are tucked securely under the sheets so the monster under your bed can’t reach them.

But they are peppered with boring slice-of-life scenes in between, with long winded small talk so that we can get to know each of the six characters.

Toward the end, as the plot needs to start wrapping up, the characters simply make deducations without justifications. Things like “there must be a book in this house” and “something I didn’t believe was real before is real now” are common place, while the island’s tragic history just sort of pops up as they happened to buy a book about it in town.

Interwoven throughout the narrative are flashbacks to both Nell’s experience with her sleep demon as she learns to tame it and her experience with sexual assault (which is heavily hinted at throughout the story and doesn’t serve well as a big late reveal). But these sections, serve more like space in between actual story more than they do to help actually move the plot along.