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We are back for 2025! We took a hiatus during the second half of 2024 due to our lives becoming that much busier. But loving what we have built with the show over the almost 10 years we’ve been running (!) we wanted to find a way to continue with BtGS. To that end, we’re still here, feminist and queer, but we’ll be moving to a monthly instead of bi-monthly publishing schedule that we feel better able to manage.
Our first guest of the season is a returning favourite of ours, Grady Hendrix, whose latest book is set in a sinister house for “wayward girls” i.e. pregnant teenagers. We ask Grady what it’s like to write so intimately about the female body – something outside his direct experience – about why he chose this particular setting, and about the relationship between women and witchcraft.
Intro
The history of witchcraft could be said to be the history of women – or rather a history of their persecution. Of course, historians will point out that men have also been accused of witchcraft and faced the same fate, but their cases remain in the minority. On the whole, if the word “witch” was shouted by a member of the community, all eyes would turn to the women.
Today the subject of witchcraft has become popular. Wicca is a positive practice, and there are many self-care books authored by witches which help you manage life’s trials with spells and rituals. Instead of hiding in the darkness, people go around wearing t-shirts claiming: “We’re the granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn.” However, an interesting article by Dr Eleanor Janega points out that not only is this factually inaccurate since most witches were hanged, but it’s a cutesy t-shirt making light of a very grim period in history.
Although dark academia and romantasy novels are doing big business when it comes to witchcraft, there is always a place for it in horror – for witchcraft has two sides: yes, it’s about the persecution of women, but it can also allow women to take power for themselves when they are at the mercy of others.
Grady will be in the UK to promote Witchcraft for Wayward Girls. If you are inspired after listening to his eloquent interview, you can see him speak in person and pick up a copy of the book.
Grady Hendrix is a New York Times bestselling novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and Horrorstör. His books have sold over two million copies and have been translated into more than twenty languages. He also writes nonfiction and his history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, Paperbacks from Hell, received the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction.
