The Witch of Willow Sound by Vanessa F. Penney

Reviewed by Wendy Hawkin

Phaedra Luck may be no Greek princess like her mythical namesake, but she’s one fierce female protagonist. When we first meet “Fade” she’s sleeping rough in a cemetery. Like her missing great aunt Madeline, Fade survives on society’s fringes, woven into nature like other wild things—wolves, women, rabbits, and black bears.

From the dark, disturbing prologue (listen to the author read it here) to the bittersweet end, Penney unravels an epic family tragedy using flawless poetic prose and cinematic imagery. She’s a masterful writer, her chosen words and phrases, evocative and sensory. Blood stains these pages. Fire burns from the creases. “A sharp whiff of something wicked stings my nose. A wretched smell. Burnt. Like scorched meat” (18).

Buried within these charred pages are Gothic horror tropes that expose the darker side of humanity. The witch of Willow Sound lives in an isolated cabin along the coast of Nova Scotia—a cabin that Madeline Luck has built with her own two hands using the materials at hand on Micmac land.

The setting is as much a character as the missing Madeline, her niece Fade who’s come to find her, and Fade’s new sidekick Dr. Anish Chaudry AKA Nish, a PhD historian who helps to unravel the mystery. All good gothic stories evoke weather, and this is no exception. Hurricane Lettie appears like a mythic goddess at the appropriate moment, acting as both healer and destroyer.

Penney explores the mythos of madness in several ways. Madeline’s cozy cabin is juxtaposed not only with the horror lying in the hole below, but with the mad town of Grand Tea—a town thriving on occult tourism that wants to build a lucrative shrine to Madeline, their local witch. The townspeople survive at the edge of a cliff under a massive rock where rain falls “with Cenozoic era rock dust” (143) and their mad Mayor Davish becomes a strange symbol of patriarchal culture to foil this matriarchy.

Described as a “feminist tale about women called witches,” Penney’s story is at once, both mesmerizing, complex, highly entertaining, and an unapologetic statement illustrating the horrors historically and culturally perpetrated against women and children marginalized by society. In Penney’s words, the story” sheds light on what societies do with people and the past they don’t want.” Her Afterword not only reveals her inspiration for the story, but also the magnitude of crimes perpetrated by one tiny Canadian province: “All stories about Nova Scotia must have some darkness in them, I say. Because of all the bones” (309). Unapologetic, and rightfully so. The book is destined to become a classic of East Coast regional folklore.

Penney leaves no list of accolades; in fact, this could be her debut novel. If it is, it will not be her last. There is something precious here to read and savour.

For those readers, intrigued by witches and spells and such things, you will find them woven into these words and buried beneath the dirt and bones of this book. Madeline leaves a hand-made grimoire, and a spell jar containing “a black candle, a white candle, a clove of garlic, a wild rose stem smothered with thorns, a spring of elderberries, and a snip of a rosemary. Everything is flecked with some kind of sparkly black spice.” Black salt. Madeline buried this spell in the earth to protect her house. They are “traditional objects with ancient meanings” (99). But my favourite spells are the old photographs with words on the back that invoke the dead. “Maddie. Berry tea. Rosemary” (286). What would your spell be?

Beneath this tragic tale is another deeply layered story, a catalyst I dare not tell. But I promise you this: It will tear a hole in your heart.

The Witch of Willow Sound is published by ECW Press.