I spent Walpurgisnacht and Beltane in bed - but not for any saucy May Day reasons. I managed to strain my lumber region while gardening on April 30th. This meant all that evening and most of May Day saw me lying on my back in pain, rather than cavorting with Jack-in-the-Green. However, I made the most of my enforced rest time by reading the magical fiction published by Moon Books, an imprint of Collective Ink.
You might be surprised that a publisher primarily known for pagan and witchy non-fiction also produces novels. I was personally very lucky that Moon Books chose my own work of gothic fiction, Erosion, as one of the first it published last year. There are now other titles alongside mine: A Westerly Wind Brings Witches by Sally Walker; Black Magick: 13 Tales of Darkness, Horror and the Occult, edited and contributed to by Raven Digitalis; and from a sister imprint: To Everything There is a Season by Julie Conrad.
I don't normally review fiction on A Bad Witch's Blog, but I'm making an exception because tomorrow is Wordsmith Day, and because I think these books are worth it. I guess I've also written this post because I wanted to feel a bit less guilty about spending a day reading stories rather than working.
From the description, I'd assumed this would be a humorous look at modern pagan witchcraft, new age spirituality, and ladies of a certain age who frequent such gatherings, but it's much more than that. There is gentle humour, but also romance, tragedy and oodles to think about within its pages. I absolutely loved it.
Here's a snippet from the synopsis on Moon Books' website:
Moira Box, with not a lot going for her, legs it down to Cornwall to join a cantankerous coven of stroppy women. Shapeshifting poor Mogs back to The Burning Times, when women’s role in the lingering rural folkways was disappearing from Merrie England. But today, wild women wrapped in cloaks pop up amongst the Cornish standing stones on a full moon basis!
I thoroughly recommend this novel to anyone who likes witch lit, but especially if you aren't the young, willowy, glamorous, Tiktok influencer variety. This is down-to-earth realistic witchcraft, but also shows that even the fat and frumpy can have out-of-this world magical experiences.
A Westerly Wind Brings Witches won Kindred Spirit Magazine’s 2024 Writer of the Year MBS award. It deserved the accolade.
After wiping a few tears from my eyes when I finished A Westerly Wind Brings Witches, I eagerly started Black Magick: 13 Tales of Darkness, Horror and the Occult. It contains short stories by Storm Constantine, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tracy Cross, Edgar Allan Poe, and Raven Digitalis among others.
I'm a fan of horror fiction generally, but what I particularly like about this collection is that the main characters are frequently themselves witches or similar practitioners. Here's a precis of the synopsis on Moon Books' website:
Through the 13 stories presented in Black Magick, the reader is transported into mysterious settings that blur the line between fiction and reality. Each story uniquely integrates occultism and magick... By acknowledging darkness through the written medium, we can better come to terms with the darkness within ourselves. And when we explore the darker aspects of life, we more accurately come to know what it means to be human.
I read To Everything There is a Season some months ago, before it went to press. Author Julie Conrad asked for my opinions when she was still doing the final edits, and I was delighted to write an endorsement. Here it is:
This is a book that first lulls you with gentle nostalgia, then ramps up to become a page-turner with plot twists aplenty. There’s something for everyone: romance, murder, messages from beyond the grave, a web of intrigue, and a happy ending. The message is that life is always full of surprises.
The novel has an official release date of 27th May 2025 and is available now for pre orders. You can find it on the Collective Ink website under the Roundfire imprint, a sister imprint to Moon Books
''It all began when we found the bones…'' This is the start of Erosion, a gothic novel set on the English coast, in 1987, the year of the Great Storm. Violent weather is but one of the problems a group of friends face when they discover an ancient grave inside a crumbling cliff and decide to unearth a skull. Supernatural mystery intertwines with the problems of human relationships, of earning money, of following dreams.
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