Here are 80 books that Deadly Words fans have personally recommended if you like
Deadly Words.
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I’ve been researching and writing histories of witchcraft for over twenty years because I wanted to know why people would confess to a crime that they couldn’t have committed. I especially wanted to know about women’s stories of witchcraft, and I found that fiction really helped me to imagine their worlds. I’m a Professor at Exeter University and I’m working on two new books about witchcraft trials: The Witches of St Osyth and Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. I’m trying to feel every word and give the “witches” the empathy they deserve.
The immersive and tragic history of a witch trial in Bideford, Devon, England in 1682 puts the “witches” back at the centre of their story and tries to imagine their world with sympathy and insight. This is a very well-researched book, drawing on documents from the town and printed news pamphlets about the trial, as well as on the author’s wider knowledge of witchcraft and demonology (the study of devils and witches). It evokes the sinister atmosphere in the town very effectively. The story is well told, pacy, and easy to follow, and I learned a lot about the women and their world – telling details that I thought might have been lost to history, but are rediscovered and thrillingly told here.
"Fascinating and vivid." New Statesman "Thoroughly researched." The Spectator "Intriguing." BBC History Magazine "Vividly told." BBC History Revealed "A timely warning against persecution." Morning Star "Astute and thoughtful." History Today "An important work." All About History "Well-researched." The Tablet
On the morning of Thursday 29 June 1682, a magpie came rasping, rapping and tapping at the window of a prosperous Devon merchant. Frightened by its appearance, his servants and members of his family had, within a matter of hours, convinced themselves that the bird was an emissary of the devil sent by witches to destroy the fabric of their lives.…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
As a queer reader and writer of horror, I have little interest in anything that could be deemed “positive representation.” Horror is most compelling when it gets honest and ugly about the bad, selfish, cruel, or simply unwise choices people make when they’re truly scared–and that includes queer people. I love queer stories that aren’t primarily romantic or neatly resolved. I like messy groups of friends, toxic emotional entanglements, and family dynamics that don’t fit in a Hallmark card. These days there are lots of stories in other genres about queer people becoming their best selves, but horror also has space for us at our worst.
In choosing a theme for this list, I was very careful to think of one that would allow me to include this book, my favorite haunted house novel of all time. It’s gay; it’s weird; its central mystery is never fully resolved, which may be why it’s stuck with me for years and is one of the few novels I’ve reread more than twice as an adult.
Miranda Silver is neither a classic Gothic heroine nor an ass-kicking Sidney Prescott type, but someone stranger and more opaque. She’s confused and lonely and an unreliable narrator. Her romance with classmate Ore might offer some respite from the terrors of her family’s ancestral home, but it’s not enough to save her.
I love a queer story without a happily ever after. Knowing who you are and who you love doesn’t always make everything turn out okay. Sometimes, it just means you have…
Haunting in every sense, White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi is a spine-tingling tribute to the power of magic, myth and memory.
High on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the loss of Lily, mother of twins Eliot and Miranda, and beloved wife of Luc. Miranda misses her with particular intensity. Their mazy, capricious house belonged to her mother's ancestors, and to Miranda, newly attuned to spirits, newly hungry for chalk, it seems they have never left. Forcing apples to grow in winter, revealing and concealing secret floors, the house is fiercely possessive of young…
I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age.
I picked this book up, thinking it might have to do with witch trials in Europe during the 17th Century, and in a peripheral way, it does because it’s very loosely based on the life of Katharina Kepler, the mother of famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. (And really, how can you resist the title.) But the novel delivered so much more.
It’s a witty, searing meditation on community, gossip and envy, the strictures of society, the corruption of power, and a woman’s determination to be her own person. Add to that some of the funniest, most absurd situations I’ve read in a long while. Some sections of the novel are truly laugh-aloud.
The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.
The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.
Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
I’ve been researching and writing histories of witchcraft for over twenty years because I wanted to know why people would confess to a crime that they couldn’t have committed. I especially wanted to know about women’s stories of witchcraft, and I found that fiction really helped me to imagine their worlds. I’m a Professor at Exeter University and I’m working on two new books about witchcraft trials: The Witches of St Osyth and Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. I’m trying to feel every word and give the “witches” the empathy they deserve.
A thoughtful and well-researched novel about the “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, who hunted witches in eastern England during the mid-seventeenth century Civil War. Or rather, it’s not about Matthew but about his fictional sister, Alice. Focusing on Alice is a clever and thought-provoking way of telling a famous story, making us look harder at the women involved in the witch hunt and how they might have felt about their experiences. How did women feel about witchfinders in their families and among their friends? Did they really suspect other women of witchcraft? Were they able to avoid becoming complicit in witch-hunting?
It’s a lively and horrifying story that has a really convincing seventeenth-century feel and it made me uncomfortable. What would I have done if a witch-hunt had come to my village? What would you do?
'The number of women my brother Matthew killed, so far as I can reckon it, is one hundred and six . . .'
THE PAGE-TURNING RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB BESTSELLER
'A compelling debut from a gifted storyteller' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent _________________________
When Alice Hopkins' husband dies in a tragic accident, she returns to the small Essex town of Manningtree, where her brother Matthew still lives.
But home is no longer a place of safety. Matthew has changed, and there are rumours spreading through the town: whispers of witchcraft, and of a great book, in which…
I am fascinated by the things people do and the reasons they give for doing them. That people also do things in culturally specific ways and that their culturally specific ways of doing things are related to their culturally specific ideas about what makes sense and what does not inspires in me a sense of awe. As a professor and historian, thinking anthropologically has always been an important tool, because it helps me look for the hidden, cultural logics that guided the behavior of people in history. It helps me ask different questions. And it sharpens my sense of humility for the fundamental unknowability of this world we call home.
The Anti-Witch is kind of a follow-up to Favret-Saada’s complex and brilliant Deadly Words, in which the author wrestled with the phenomenon of modern witchcraft beliefs in northern France’s Bocage region and tried to get inside the logic of those beliefs. I said modern witchcraft beliefs, because for me as a historian, what Favret-Saada contributed most to my understanding of this phenomenon lay in the way that she insisted on its historicity. That’s a historian’s way of saying that she did not treat witchcraft beliefs as “timeless relics” that some people weirdly “still” believe, but rather as an evolving set of practices and ways of thinking about how the world works, and the place of evil within it.
Jeanne Favret-Saada is arguably one of France's most brilliant anthropologists, and The Anti-Witch is nothing less than a masterpiece. A synthesis of ethnographic theory and psychoanalytic revelation, where the line between researcher and subject is blurred - if not erased - The Anti-Witch develops the contours of an anthropology of therapy, while deeply engaging with what it means to be caught in the logic of witchcraft. Through an intimate and provocative sharing of the ethnographic voice with Madame Flora, a "dewitcher," Favret-Saada delivers a critical challenge to some of anthropology's fundamental concepts. Sure to be of interest to practitioners of…
"Write what you know" is worn-out advice you'll find on many a website, but I prefer to write what I want to know. Researching for background information is a far cry from studying the history of dates, places, and politics. For instance, you won't read in a history book that forks weren't used at the table in the Renaissance. That people didn't have zippers or right/left shoes, but they did have buttons. Noblemen wore high-heeled shoes. Women poisoned themselves with makeup of white lead (ceruse). Even with diaries, autobiographies, and social history books, trivial information of daily life is hard to find.
This nonfiction about a French priest who was burned at the stake in 1634 reads like fiction. Although I knew the story and how it ends, Rapley’s writing is suspensful and dramatic. The author keeps close to Grandier, whose character flaws contribute to his death. Grandier’s enemies are given their separate situations and in some cases are treated with generosity. Though the writing is not emotional, I was dismayed and hardly able to believe this actually happened.
As a Catholic priest, Grandier was an influential figure in the Loudun community and local government. A brilliant speaker, he was popular with his parishioners. But he had enemies, including Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII, who was trying to wrest political autonomy from local governors and centralize power in Paris. Grandier's support of the governor of Loudun meant that he was seen as an enemy of the crown. In addition, the debonair priest's romantic intrigues brought him into conflict with some of the town's most influential power brokers. When a nearby convent of Ursuline nuns began experiencing strange visions and…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I teach history at Cambridge University and focus on the period between 1500-1700. We call this period early modernity, and associate it partly with the advances of printing, literacy, learning, and scientific discoveries. But this was also the age of the witchcraze and a period in which everyone, whether learned or illiterate, believed in the power of the devil and the presence of witches in society. It is important to me to recover women´s experiences and the experiences of families.
Alongside Germany, Lorraine was another hotspot of accusations and Briggs has worked over decades in local archives to analyse the patterns of accusations and paint a vivid picture of village life. His book underlines how complex sets of factors worked together, often over many years, to result in accusations and, in some cases, in executions.
Based on perhaps the richest surviving archive of witchcraft trials to be found in Europe, The Witches of Lorraine reveals the extraordinary stories held within those documents. They paint a vivid picture of life amongst the ordinary people of a small duchy on the borders of France and the Holy Roman Empire, and allow a very close analysis of the beliefs, social tensions, and behaviour patterns underlying popular attitudes to witchcraft.
Intense persecution occurred in the period 1570-1630, but the focus of this book is more on how suspects interacted with their neighbours over the years preceding their trials. One…
From the time I was very young, Witchcraft and the supernatural have always fascinated me. I can remember staying up late to watch horror movies or reading an Edgar Allen Poe book under the sheets with a flashlight when I was supposed to be asleep. I knew this was never a phase or something I would “outgrow”; the spell had been cast and I was forever in its power. I’ve tried to read everything I could on Witchcraft, its history and practice and anything regarding the occult. It was all of this reading and research that really helped me to write Widdershins and everything that came after. Enjoy the list!
This was the first book I ever read by HP Lovecraft and after reading it, I read everything else that I could find by such a talented writer. Lovecraft’s stories are dark, doom-ridden tales that are filled with cosmic horror, nightmarish landscapes, and indescribable monsters. But it’s not only the tales themselves that captivated me, it’s the style in which they were written. Lovecraft has such a beautiful literary style of writing that really made me feel what the characters felt and see what horrors they witnessed. His work definitely inspired me to pick up pen and paper and write stories of my own.
This extraordinary collection features 13 spine-tingling tales of delicious terror by the unquestioned master of the horror genre, as well as portions of stories he never fully completed. Discover how the mind of H.P. Lovecraft worked, and how much his early and late stories tell about this intriguing writer.
As a practicing Hedge Witch, I’m fascinated by the marriage of science and the mystical. Now, I’m alchemizing confidence, coherence, and clarity for soulful writers to pursue the books of their dreams. I am the author, illustrator, and designer of Mama Bear Says™ and the Book Witch of planners and journals for your sacred words. I live at the edge of the wild woods and love to graze on wild berries, sit by a cozy hearth, and watch the magic of the animals who meander through these lands. The magic of the natural world and the healing power of Mother Earth sits as a priority in my life. These are the books on my magickal bookshelf.
If you are witch-curious or trying to reclaim the word from the long-nosed, wart-faced, evil images that have been forced upon us by a misunderstanding society, Witch is a fun read, filled with wit and wisdom for beginning witches. “Witch” is a powerful woman, a wise healer, who lives with the cycles of Mother Earth. This book helps women remember, reconnect, and reclaim the word “witch” and the power that comes with it.
Reclaim your inner witch with the magical rituals, divination tools, spells and ancient wisdom in this revolutionary book.
A witch is a woman in her power. She's wise, a healer, someone who is aligned with the cycles of Mother Nature and the phases of the Moon. Yet for so long, the word 'witch' has had negative connotations - being used as an insult, a slur and to perpetuate fear. In this book, third generation hereditary witch Lisa Lister explains the history behind witchcraft, why in past centuries the word 'witch' has led women to be tortured, drowned and burned at…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I’m not an expert on witchcraft or the Salem Witch Trials. However, I am a historian of women’s history and a writer of historical fiction. I’m particularly drawn to stories that try to explain the inexplicable, and these five books are written by people with a similar fascination. In my opinion, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Greg Houle wrote their stories as a way to understand themselves and their family history. Stacy Schiff looked for a factual explanation of the frenzy. Frances Hill and Lucretia Grindle wove facts into stories. And I think that their differing interpretations of the same events give readers a better understanding of the past.
Houle views the Salem witchcraft frenzy through the eyes of Thomas Putnam Jr. and his daughter Ann Putnam Jr.
Thomas is a family man and community leader vexed by life’s disappointments on a personal level. His brother displaced his position in the family. His wife slips into mental unease. And his daughter Ann is afflicted by mysterious visions and fits.
Through Ann’s eyes, the reader sees specters of village women urging her to sign the devil’s book, and the image of a “Black Man” Ann thinks is the devil.
It's 1692, and the people of Salem, Massachusetts, are on edge. Amid squabbles over religion and land and fears of hostile natives lurks the ever-present terror of the devil's influence. When young girls suddenly begin to claim they are being tormented by local "witches," a chilling hysteria grips the town. At the center of the maelstrom is one family, headed by the well-respected Thomas Putnam, whose daughter Ann happens to be one of the accusing girls. Survival, betrayal, and the binding ties of a family's darkest secrets converge as we uncover the haunting secrets that bind the Putnams' legacy.
