In the vein of Rosemary’s Baby, Grady Hendrix’s highly-anticipated horror novel takes place in the 1970s at a home for unwed mothers, exploring motherhood and women’s autonomy.

WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYARD GIRLS
by Grady Hendrix
Berkley, January 2025
(via JABberwocky Literary Agency)

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, to give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

“Hendrix’s genius as a horror writer is his ability to develop complex, human-scale emotional arcs. He gilds these dramas with a glorious, gory layer of monsters and magic, but in his work, the uncanny exists primarily to symbolize real-world issues. His characters are complex, particularly the women, and don’t fall into the easy tropes that often plague horror stories…never before has one of his books so aptly met the moment…at turns frightening, anxiety-producing, infuriating, beautiful and sad.” – The New York Times

“Another stellar novel from Hendrix, a perfectly constructed story that has a strong emotional core, compelling plot, unforgettable characters, and 360 degrees of terror.” – Booklist (starred review)

Grady Hendrix is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (which was adapted into a feature film by Amazon Studios), We Sold Our Souls, and the New York Times bestseller The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires (currently being adapted into a TV series). Grady also authored the Bram Stoker Award–winning nonfiction book Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties, and his latest non-fiction book is These Fists Break Bricks: How Kung Fu Movies Swept America and Changed the World.