Oh, Daisy, I’m so sorry. How did it happen? …He walked.

43. Witch’s Sister – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

The first in the series. Mrs. Tuggle is freaking terrifying. She’s manipulative, she has a funny name but she is not a nice, amusing, pleasant elderly lady…she’s like the elderly neighbor from Spaced if she really had been cooking Colin (I mean, Lancelot) ala Fatal Attraction instead of whatever she was doing with a stuffed rabbit on the stove – I’ve never used the stove-boiling option for cleaning the pigs’ stuffed animals, I stick with the washer and dryer, was she sterilizing? Dogs are involved, I barely understand them because they’re not misunderstood fuzzy things that don’t make me sneeze originally from South America. Anyhoo, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has a serious gift for creating disturbing images and situations and making some shit tense for child readers. So very tense. Someday I suspect I will locate Witch Water, The Witch Herself, and The Witch Returns and finish reading the series and end up just as scared as I did when I read The Witch’s Eye as a kid.

Belvedere’s best “standing on a pumpkin” photo. Thankfully, Mrs. Tuggle and her creeptastic attempts at manipulation will never reach his adorable little head. He was only ever loyal to me anyway, that witch would never have gotten to him.