Book review: White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

Let’s just get out of the way that the blurb is a complete lie. As in nothing about it is true. Normally, I’d devote a whole page of insults about this because I hate being sold a book on a false promise. But when I finished White is for Witching, I really felt sorry for the poor bastard who had to sum this up and make it sound mainstream. Like for instance, the blurb says the main character starts eating chalk after the death of her mother. This isn’t true, and Miranda had suffered from pica long before her mother died. The blurb also called Ore Miranda’s friend, but Ore is Miranda’s lesbian lover. I can almost understand that lie, as nothing makes people scatter from a book like a gay interracial relationship.

But it’s not just their relationship or Miranda’s affliction that’s hard to sum up. How does the blurb maker explain the challenging narrative structure shared by two characters in first person perspective, a house that’s a habitual liar and a psychopath, and an unidentifiable third person? How will they slip people into this challenging mixture where narratives can flip on a word and cause jarring confusion about who is speaking? No, if one had to sell this book on honesty, it simply wouldn’t sell. So the blurb is a complete lie because it has to be.

How do I shelve this book? Is it dark fantasy or literary horror? Maybe it’s both? There’s not much I can say with certainty about the story because there’s a lot of unreliable narration going on. About the only character who can be considered mostly reliable is Ore, and her part in the book doesn’t come until just after the midway point. Until then, the story bounces between Miranda Silver’s twin brother Eliot, the house they live in, and a third person who handles duties for Miranda. By the shift in tone, it’s clearly not the house speaking for her, but I don’t think it’s any of her relatives either. Perhaps it’s just God. (In the sense that the author is speaking directly for her creation.) Certainly, it’s when the third person narrative takes over that the story has the most clarity. Eliot and Ore both have limited views, and their perspective is tinted by their own particular insecurities. Eliot is afraid of loving his sister a little too much in that incesty kind of way, and Ore is insecure about herself because she’s adopted.

But these two are still far more reliable than the house, who eats people, and who makes excuses for doing it. Nothing the house says can be taken at face value because the house hates people. So what history the reader gleans about Miranda’s ancestors is all suspect precisely because the house is looking to excuse his psychopathic behavior. And yes, I call the house him because there’s a distinctly male voice in his victim blaming approach. Because of this narrative style, nothing the house says can be taken as reliable. Not the birth of his awareness, and nothing he says about Miranda, her family, or the staff working inside the house. In this way, it’s like asking for the truth from someone who’s delusional. What they tell you will make perfect sense to them, but it will not be anywhere remotely close to the truth.

So what this story is really about is a house haunting the people who live inside it, preying upon the women in one bloodline because they have a history of mental illness that he likes to exploit to keep them trapped. The moment they want to leave, he eats them and then excuses his behavior by lying about what the women were “really” doing. I wasn’t so clear on this point right up until near the end when the house begins disparaging Eliot’s narration, and then it became clear who the biggest liar was. It’s the house. The cold, maniacal, manipulative house who looks for reasons to hate and destroy the people living inside it. Even when he seems to be describing his actions in a straightforward manner, later scenes from other perspectives make his story sketchy at best.

And this is why this book will be so very challenging for most readers, because it’s lying to you in such a way that it defies direct interpretation. You have to take these different views and think sideways about what’s really going on. There’s a lot of unanswered questions in the end, subplots that are mentioned early on but never resolved clearly. The ending is abrupt and depressing, reminding me bit of an old ghost movie, The Haunting of Julia. It’s the sort of story that leaves me feeling deeply unsettled, and I consider that a far more effective form of horror than a million buckets of blood or a room full of severed body parts. It’s the kind of creeping dread that makes you feel hopeless and uncertain rather than going for a visual shock.

I’ll give White is for Witching 5 stars, but I’d suggest it to readers who don’t mind being lied to and left to their own wild guesses about what’s really happening. It’s the kind of story that leaves a lot to the imagination of the reader, so people looking for direct interpretation will be put off by its ambiguity. But if you can get past that sticking point, I think it’s worth your time. This was my first book by Helen Oyeyemi, but after this first sample, I’m going to pick up her newest release, Boy, Snow, Bird. She is a talented and challenging writer and could quickly move up my list of favorite authors.