Grady Hendrix on Unlocking the Power of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls
(Photo: Albert Mitchell 2021)
It was probably only a matter of time before Grady Hendrix got around to witches.
The bestselling author, historian, podcast, and speaker has tackled vampires (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires), Demons (My Best Friend’s Exorcism), slashers (The Final Girl Support Group), haunted houses (How to Sell a Haunted House), and more in over a decade of publishing horror novels. Witches seemed like a natural next step.
But even in a world where Hendrix readers are used to watching him pick apart subgenre after subgenre, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls feels like something special. The story of four pregnant teenagers – code-named Fern, Rose, Zinnia, and Holly by their caretakers – who are sequestered in a home for unwed mothers in Florida in 1970, it’s an exploration of how power is wielded, who gets to wield it, and what happens when those balances shift in sudden, supernatural ways. It’s also, of course, a Grady Hendrix novel, with all the fun explorations of horror tropes and social dynamics that come with it.
To celebrate the book’s release, Paste sat down with Hendrix to discuss the very personal origins of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, how the characters took shape, and what he hopes readers glean from his take on witches.
Paste Magazine: I want to drill down a little into the origin story of this book because you mentioned Witchcraft for Wayward Girls was inspired by a story in your family. How did that story first hit you, and how did it eventually translate to this novel?
Grady Hendrix: So, two of my relatives were sent away when they were [pregnant] teenagers. And they didn’t talk about this until probably they were in their 70s. The family did not know. The reason it came up is one of them, her son had reached out and they reunited. And she was like, “It’s time people know this.” Seeing the enormous positive impact that had on her life and his life, was huge. And to think, “God, they’ve been kept away for 50 years. That’s insane. How do you do that to a mom and their kid?” Then another relative in my family never reunited with her child, and I was always aware of it as something that was a little unhealed with her. It didn’t ruin her life, but it was a wound she had that had never gotten a chance to heal.
I was really trying to wrap [my head around], “How do we do that? What is this? I don’t even know these homes.” So I read a book by Ann Fessler called The Girls Who Went Away, which is an oral history of the homes. She interviews all these women who were sent away. It’s one of the few books written about the homes, and it’s really powerful. That was when I thought, “God, this setting.” It’s these teenage girls locked up in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where they are. They have no power. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. No one will tell them. They don’t even know each other’s real names. The only people they can rely on are each other.
I was like, “That’s a setting.” And it just always sort of lived in my head. I was getting more and more into folk horror at the time. I have a whole version of How to Sell a Haunted House where I was awkwardly trying to shoehorn in a folk horror kind of element to it that got cut mercifully. I was like, “I really want to do a folk horror book, and I think I could do it about the maternity homes.” And I had a title with witches in it, and I wrote a couple of drafts, and it was pretty lax. By that point, this was the next book, I’d spent months on it. And my editor said, “Well, maybe you should put some witches in it.” I was like, “Oh, right, it’s in the title.” Then things just started to pick up steam.
Paste: You obviously did a lot of research not just into the homes for wayward girls, but into 1970 in Florida in general. What were you most struck by?
Hendrix: So, two things. One is, it was really, really hard for me now to realize how apocalyptic 1970 felt to people. There was this real feeling when you read books from then—magazines, newspapers—that people really thought the country was falling apart and was not going to come back together. There was a generational war and it was over and there was going to be a revolution. Now it sounds cute and we kind of smile at it, but at the time it felt desperate.
You had young people watching old people send them to die in Vietnam, cheering on the National Guard at Kent State who gunned them down, killing them in the streets. The young people are like, “OK, we are at war.” They would go into basements and build bombs. They would attack cops. So, that was really hard to get that tone, that this felt like a war between young people and old people, and there would not be a happy ending.
The other thing that really hit me is how much we hated unwed mothers. You see it all the way back to the 1890s and forward, you see it up until now. We call them things like welfare queens, and single-parent households, but we blame them for everything. I mean, there was a newspaper headline talking about housing unwed mothers in Alcatraz. Anne Landers would lash out at any woman who wrote into her advice column, who was an unwed mother, about how irresponsible and sick they were.
Politicians would talk about how these women were causing the downfall of our civilization. It was crazy. These were teenage girls who’d been raped, who hadn’t had access to birth control, who had been date raped, who didn’t know birth control existed, who believed some promise a guy made that he didn’t follow up. These were kids. And the guys never got punished for this. Where are the unwed fathers? As one book from 1964 said, there are simply no statistics for them. It all got laid at the [girls’] feet. The venom and that anger, was really, really an eye-opener to me.
Paste: So, in the middle of all of that, you are dropping Fern, your primary POV character, who is a wonderful point of entry into this world because she’s just so desperate for any kind of information or sure footing that will make her feel a little better about her situation. Where did Fern come from for you?
Hendrix: Fern was kind of the last of the girls to appear. She was in all the drafts, but she was very vague. Rose came first, then Zinnia. Then Holly was kind of there, but Holly and Fern came into real focus later. I was like, “Of course, Fern has a little sister at home, who she hates. Holly is a little sister here who she can mother, or try to mother.”
I also realized that Fern wanted to be liked. I found a picture, because I’ve got this big wall over my desk that I put visual references on, and I found a picture from an Alabama high school yearbook from 1969 of a girl, and I was like, “That’s Fern.” There was just something, this girl so wanted to be liked, and she looked so hopeful that whoever she was going to talk to next would like her., But you felt like maybe they didn’t always. She just seemed like someone who just kept putting herself out there. And it didn’t always work out, but she would just brush herself off and keep going. And I was like, “That’s her.” But she came a little later.
Paste: Rose feels like one of those characters who adopted some of that revolutionary attitude you were talking about earlier. Why did she come first?
Hendrix: Oh, I love people who put up a front. I know people like that. They’re very principled, they take a stand, and they’re very militant in their stances. But they kind of bend the rules when it comes to them. As much as I love Rose, there’s something very naive about her. There were earlier drafts where you got more of her just making things up to impress people. One of the things with Rose: it kills her that she got taken advantage of by a boy. That she went all in on a guy who just dumped her at the first opportunity.I think that’s a hurt she carries around maybe all her life. “How could I be so stupid?” And the way she punishes herself for that, and the way she punishes everyone around her for that, is a lot of her personality.
Paste: You mentioned that earlier drafts relied less on the witchcraft, and even in this version of the book the witches emerge slowly and organically. What sources did you turn to in order to make the witchcraft feel not only convincing but organic to these girls as people?
Hendrix: I was pretty familiar with witch literature. I studied a lot of that in university, like the witch crazes of the 16th and 15th centuries. So I knew the stuff. I knew that it was very on the body, it was very bloody. It was a lot of feeding familiars from a secret nipple, dripping blood, and killing babies. I then looked at Wicca, and the Wiccan traditions, and I was like, that’s a very different kind of magic.
I was also looking at folk magic, especially Appalachian folk magic. I’m a big fan of black magic movies from Hong Kong, which was sort of a genre that existed from the late 70s into the early 80s, where some Hong Konger would go to a “less civilized” country like Malaysia, or Indonesia, and encounter a wizard or a witch, and then get a blood curse slapped on them. Those movies are very visceral, very goopy, and very body horror-oriented.
I knew that I wanted my witchcraft to touch some of those folk magic things, like stealing hair, blood, and things. But I also knew to ramp it up, if it was going to be real, it had to be painful. The blood had to be in vast quantities to activate these spells.
So then with the girls, it was really like, “Well, how would they react to this?” And I was like, “Oh, Rose would be all in. Fern likes books, Fern’s all about books, Fern’s all about learning. Zinnia is smart, and would be like, ‘No, guys, this never works out well. I’ve read books. It never works out well.'” And Holly is sort of the one who is, “I’m willing to try anything because I don’t have anything left to try.”
In a way, for me, the metaphor with this was running away to join an underground terrorist cell. You know what I mean? How much violence are you willing to use? How much violence is justified? Does taking up the tools of your oppressor make you as bad as they are? And that attitude of, “Hey, it’s fun to go to a protest,” “Hey, it’s fun to chain yourself to a gate of an army base,” “Hey, it’s another thing to live on the run under a secret identity and never see my family again, and put pipe bombs in ROTC offices.” I really wanted that sort of be like, “How radical are they going to get?”
Paste: The book is scary from the beginning but in a more existential way in that it follows these girls who have lost all control of their own lives. Later, the more visceral horror kicks in, and there’s always a lot of debate within the world of horror about how scary a book needs to be, how soon, and how to balance the scares with the characters. How do you see that debate?
Hendrix: I don’t have an overriding philosophy. If it works, it works. One thing I’ve noticed though is that there’s a real problem with the escalation of gore in horror. If on page 10 you decapitate a four-year-old, what have you got to do on page 200 to get a real scare? One of the really funny things people say about movies a lot is, “Oh, if they show you that any character can die, then you’re tense.” And I’m like, “No, I can tell you pretty much who’s going to die and in what order from the beginning of any horror movie, trust me.”
What I think a movie like Scream does so well is it shows you any character can escape. Drew Barrymore comes so close to escaping in that opening. Neve Campbell escapes early on. They show you that Ghostface can get kicked in the nuts, he can go down, he can slip on a floor. That made me tense with Scream, being like, “Oh, my God, they’ve got a chance here.”
So, one thing I try to do with my books is, I want the horror to be small, but I want the reader to be so invested in the characters, that they get how it feels for that character. I mean, no one dies in How to Sell a Haunted House, but I’m able to get it so you care about these characters. That’s the plan: to get people to care about them. And then have the worst possible things happen to them again and again. The worst possible thing that’s going to happen to me in my life is not dying. I am going to be dead, I’m not going to care. The worst possible thing that’s going to happen to me in my life, I’m going to survive and have to deal with it. That’s what I want to have happen to my characters. Whether it’s a physical injury, or an emotional devastation, an emotional blow, I want the reader to care. And if it takes some time to build that up, then okay.
Paste Magazine: You are known at this point for writing female protagonists in your horror novels, but this is a very particular kind of story about female characters. How did your approach to writing female protagonists change and grow as you were dealing with this very unique responsibility to this kind of character?
Hendrix: I was desperate not to screw it up. So I talked to a lot of women, a lot of moms. I did a lot of listening. But I also really read a lot. There was a lot of fiction written in the 60s and 70s about unwed mothers. Books like The House of Tomorrow, The Girls of Huntington House, and especially Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, that were pulled from the point of view of people in the homes. Then reading online, [seeing women talking about their experiences in these homes. I really gained so much respect for them, what they went through at such an early age, and it didn’t ruin them, it didn’t wreck them. A lot of them had problems later dealing with it, but they lived their lives. And the women in my family, they lived their lives.
I was like, “OK, I want to take my hat off to these women. But to show them at their strongest, I have to also show them at their most vulnerable and their weakest. When they are taken advantage of when these things happen.” And so that was hard, because it felt mean. But at a certain point, and this is going to sound really stupid, I started to feel a sense of responsibility to these characters and getting them somewhere better, and getting them through this horrible situation I’ve set up. I felt very defensive of them.
Paste Magazine: The book is coming out at a time when reproductive freedom is under serious threat, and I know you didn’t necessarily choose this specific moment, but what are you hoping readers can take away from this story?
Grady: It’s interesting because that definitely was on my mind as I was writing. After I got to a certain point of the book I was like, “Oh, crap, this book is coming out [in these times].” But the thing I really want people to take away from this is—there’s a moment in the book where someone shows kindness. There’s an act of mercy. And it’s not easy, and it’s painful, and it’s hard. I was doing a video thing a couple of days ago, and I was talking about the homes and people who stood up to them and fought back. That language is so busted. I was like, this instinct to take revenge, to lash out … at one moment in the book, the girls do take revenge, and I hope it comes across as a complete and total abuse of their power, that they’ve gone too far.
But it’s the idea that the most radical thing you can do sometimes is when you have absolute power over someone else, to give them a simple act of kindness that they need so badly, that may not even be in your best interests. That’s such a radical thing. It’s happened to me a few times in my life when I have been at a low, and someone who is in a position of authority or having power over my life didn’t choose to exercise it.
I think that in a world where you can do anything, there are so many options out there. I can go buy a bunch of guns and just go to the range every day, I can go do so much. The things we choose not to do, I almost think become more powerful than the things we choose to do, because we have such unlimited choice. I wanted there to be a couple of moments in this where that happens. And I hope they stick out for people.
Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is available now.
Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.