“Any good encyclopedia will give you all the nonsense you want to know about witchcraft.”

2. Candlemas Eve – Jeffrey Sackett

Abigail Williams strikes again! Sort of. In Candlemas Eve what Abigail Williams really demonstrated is an unwillingness to let go of a teenage crush thwarted by…her own accusations of witchcraft. She never found out John Proctor never loved her, she just assumed he did because her unfinished teenage brain told her if she just got his wife killed as a witch, he would love her forever. She really didn’t know much about relationships and she still doesn’t when she comes back from hell to join descendant Simon Proctor’s band so she can have John Proctor as a money-grubbing musician/fake warlock. Oh, Abigail. Sure, she’s murderous and vile and sworn to Satan, but she’s also still basically a naive teen from Salem circa 1692. Simon really uses her to his own advantage, just like his ancestor.

This makes it sound like Abigail or her new form Gwendolyn is sympathetic, but she isn’t in this story, she’s just as super terrible and selfish and enraged and drags her friends into her messy leftover drama from the streets of Salem to the streets of Boston to Hell to New Hampshire. I do wish she’d had a door to slam back in Salem so she didn’t set off a witch hunt. But she didn’t, so here we are on Candlemas Eve waiting for her to wreak bloody (it’s extremely bloody, quite a bit of this book is) vengeance instead of for the groundhog to tell us about the upcoming weather and maybe take a chunk out of the listening guy in a top hat (slightly less bloody than this book, slightly).

 

Ozymandias knows what to do when the other kind of rodent predicts cold weather continuing, or when a teenage witch goes on a rampage 300 years late, hide in a blanket.