Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is an original Southern Gothic horror from New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix.
'I did an evil thing to be put in here, and I'm going to have to do an evil thing to get out.'
They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they're sent to the Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.
Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. There, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. Rose, a hippie who insists she's going to keep her baby and escape to a commune. Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby's father. And Holly, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.
Every moment of their waking day is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what's best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it's never given freely. There's always a price to be paid...and it's usually paid in blood.
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About the Author
Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of several New York Times bestsellers including How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires and many more. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages and sold over two million copies. He also writes non-fiction and his history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, won the Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction.
Industry Reviews
This book is so twisted and smart, it could hide behind a spiral staircase. It's got such a warm beating heart, and it broke mine several times. As soon as I finished, I wanted to start all over again -- Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street and Nowhere Burning
There's spells, there's witches, and then there's the magic Grady Hendrix conjures up in this amazing novel -- Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of I Was a Teenage Slasher
A morally complex and genuinely haunting and moving tale. I couldn't put it down once I started -- Paul Tremblay, bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World
Grady Hendrix's Witchcraft for Wayward Girls will delight fans new and old with his convincing rendering of characters juggling pregnancy and magic, childhood and adulthood, helplessness and power - and of course good and evil. Another nail-biter not to be missed! -- Tananarive Due, author of The Reformatory
This is Satan's School for Girls or The Initiation of Sarah . . . horror, social comment and wicked black humour -- Kim Newman, author of Anno Dracula
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is terrifying, darkly funny, moving, immersive, and deeply relevant - a page-turner that will keep you up until one in the morning . . . Grady Hendrix is at the top of his game -- Simone St. James, New York Times bestselling author of Murder Road
