THERE ARE WITCHES IN THE WOODS
Greetings, ghouls.
Our latest publication, Jessica Leonard’s Conjuring the Witch, is finally available wherever books are sold.
It is a fierce, disturbing novel about a church in a small town and the woods that surround it. It is a dark, haunted story about what those in power are willing to do to stay in power, and the sins we convince ourselves are forgivable. And it is one damn good horror book.
Check out the jacket art from Matthew Revert:
For those who can’t read the back cover on the jacket, here’s a little bit more about Conjuring the Witch…
There are witches in the woods. These are the words the reverend of the Lilin Assembly of Our Lord repeats to his parishioners each week. Steve and Nicole Warby think it’s just a metaphor, until Nicole takes a walk in those woods and comes back changed. Something came out of them with her, and the simple small-town life they’ve always known is forever altered when they discover the dark secrets buried deep and those intent on keeping them there. Fearing for his wife’s sanity, and his own comfortable status in the church, Steve is unsure if he wants to help or ignore the problems. The reverend believes there are witches in the woods, and he thinks Nicole is only the most recent.
Over on Do Some Damage, Scott Adlerberg (author of the forthcoming The Screaming Child) interviewed Jessica Leonard about the “presentation of witches in fiction, nature as a sentient character, and a host of other things” related to her new novel. Check out the full conversation HERE.
You can also watch her read an excerpt from Conjuring the Witch in this video recorded at this year’s Ghoulish Book Festival:
If you are in the Kentucky area, consider stopping by Butcher Cabin Books in Louisville on May 13th for an exciting book launch.
If you pre-ordered through our webstore or selected a copy from our recent Kickstarter campaign, copies have started shipping out already and will continue shipping throughout the week in batches. Stay tuned.
If you haven’t already ordered a copy, consider purchasing one directly from our WEBSTORE (every order comes with a signed author sticker until we run out of stickers). Otherwise you can find it on Bookshop.org, B&N, Amazon, etc. An audiobook is currently being produced with Linda Jones narrating. More on that in the near future.
After reading the book, if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review on STORYGRAPH and/or Goodreads, that would be immensely appreciated. Thank you.
And now, before we end, I’d like to share with you the first chapter from Jessica Leonard’s Conjuring the Witch. Enjoy.
Chapter 1
“There are witches in the woods.”
The reverend told them this every Sunday, and while some assumed he was being figurative, there were others among the congregation who weren’t so sure. They cast long looks out into the thick green brush that surrounded the eastern and southern sides of the Lilin Assembly of Our Lord and wondered, Are they out there?
There was a great glowing cross on the outside of the church—right in the center of the east side—that faced into the forest. Its bright pale-blue light illuminated the trees and created new and complex shadows where nature never intended them to be. This was their defense against the witches. And even those who didn’t really believe there was anyone—let alone a witch—out there, felt a sense of comfort knowing the bold LED force field protected them.
Steve and Nicole Warby had joined the church a year ago, not long after moving to Lilin. Steve’s father, Russ, had moved his family away when Steve was only three to grow his law practice. Russ had always assumed Steve would follow in his footsteps and one day he would call his office Warby and Warby. Warby and Warby was Russ’ greatest dream, and though Steve would never say it out loud, he harbored irrational guilt that moving back to Lilin to become a farmer had killed his father. That his heart stopped from pure grief instead of cholesterol and stress. Steve also believed he’d had no choice but to move. His grandfather had farmed this land, and something was always tugging at him to return. The earth itself was calling him to turn it over and find what was beneath. Earth was funny that way. And when Steve stumbled across the tiny church by the woods, everything simply felt right. He didn’t know if his grandfather had attended the church, or even if the building had been built while he was alive, but still. It felt right.
Nicole started out in the decaying farmhouse they moved to with good intentions. She planted a small vegetable garden in the side yard, but halfway through the season she let it go to weeds. The weather was hot, stifling and thick with humidity which regularly drove the heat index to record highs. Steve understood, though he himself worked outside every day. It was in his blood. This is what he’d been Called to do. Nicole didn’t know her Calling yet. Her blood held nothing more than plasma, cells, and platelets. There was no ancestral dirt drifting through her veins. The Lilin Assembly of Our Lord filled most of her days—between the women’s group and their meetings and various volunteering and fundraising—even so, she did those things only because they were there to be done, not because she was called to do them.
She’d been happy enough to move to Lilin. There was nothing anchoring her to any location in particular. Nicole’s own father had been a truck driver—or so her mother told her. He was a traveler. She thought about her dad from time to time, tried to picture who he must be. To her, he was the deafening abrupt blare of a truck horn and soft yellow headlights drifting down the highway at night. He was a ghost.
Communication between Nicole and her mother dwindled once she moved out at 18, not that there had been much to begin with. Sharon Lyons was not the sort of mother who baked, or sewed costumes for the school pageant, or stayed up late talking to her daughter about boys. She was the sort of mother who went to bars, bought TV dinners, and was an advocate for giving her daughter “privacy.” Nicole did not think about her mother from time to time—or at all, really. And that was okay. She had considered telling folks in her new home that she was an orphan, but she knew Steve would contradict her.
The Lilin Assembly of Our Lord women’s group met every Tuesday evening at 7pm, late enough to still have a family dinner beforehand. The number of women in the group fluctuated at times, however usually there were only four. They were small, and they seemed to like it small.
“Any new business?” Sara Douglas asked. Sara was the group leader. Her husband, Paul, was the head of the church’s Council, and if that made Sara the de facto women’s group leader no one knew, even so, it certainly didn’t hurt.
“I’d like to hold a bake sale,” Donna Martin answered. “We need new choir robes.”
“Okay, I second that,” said Charity Cole, because she was also in the choir and the number one rule of church organizations is to protect your own.
Nicole Warby was not listening. Instead, she was watching a silverfish scuttle across the slate-blue carpet of Sara’s living room and wondering why they held meetings there instead of at the church, which was more centrally located to most everyone. No other group used the church on Tuesdays. By design, all the various groups and committees met on different nights in order to keep at least one parent at home with the children. It encouraged church members to be more active by taking away excuses. It also encouraged, Nicole felt, members to have children. She was the only member of the women’s group without any children, something she felt keenly each time someone asked her or her husband when they were going to start a family. Nicole would always say something vague about timing, or finances. The truth was, she wasn’t sure she wanted children at all. She didn’t know how to parent, and a part of her would always wonder if she, like her father before her, was a traveler—unable to stay and nurture. If Steve had impressed anything upon her during their time together, it was that blood was thick, unchanging, and undeniable.
“If there’s nothing else, let’s move on to the Bible study,” Sara said. “Nicole, I believe you have tonight’s scripture.”
Nicole smiled and picked up her Bible from the coffee table. She knew the only reason Sara would mention her would be for the weekly scripture.
“Tonight’s good word comes from the book of Judges, chapter four. This is the story of Deborah, one of the Judges of Israel.” Nicole cleared her throat and launched into her reading. “Now Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time. She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided.”
“I hate all the Old Testament names. I never know who they’re talking about,” Charity complained.
“Shush,” Sara warned. She chose the scriptures based on a book she’d purchased about women from the Bible, which came highly recommended by a Christian Mommy blog she followed more religiously than the religion she practiced.
“Is that normal? For a woman to be leading?” Donna asked.
“Certainly not,” Sara snapped. Unscripted conversation felt like chaos and chaos felt like a strong hand closing inside her chest.
“Deborah was the only female judge in the Bible,” Charity said, smiling brightly, pleased to have something to contribute.
“You’re right,” Nicole said, and read on. “Deborah sent for Barak, son of Abinoam from Kedesh in Naphtali, and said to him, ‘The Lord, the God of Israel, commands you: “Go, take with you ten thousand men of Naphtali and Zebulun and lead them up to Mount Tabor. I will lead Sisera, the commander of Jabin’s army, with his chariots and his troops to the Kishon River and give him into your hands.”’ Barak said to her, ‘If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go.’ ‘Certainly I will go with you,’ said Deborah. ‘But because of the course you are taking, the honor will not be yours, for the Lord will deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman.’ So Deborah went with Barak to Kedesh.” Nicole closed her Bible and leaned back against the couch, satisfied with herself for pronouncing all the strange names without stumbling. And if she’d said some of them wrong, no one was going to contradict her.
“I don’t get it,” Charity said.
The room stayed silent. Nicole’s smile turned to stone as she waited for someone to speak. She didn’t want to be the one to start the discussion. Some archaic rule of order made her believe it was bad form for the one who read the verse to also be the one to begin the discussion. And besides, she knew Sara was waiting for the appropriate moment to pounce.
“It’s perfectly simple, Charity,” Sara began, taking a slow sip of water. “Deborah is only leading because a man has failed. If a man was able to step up into the role he was born to fill, Deborah wouldn’t be leading anyone.”
“Deborah was a prophet,” Donna reminded. “God doesn’t make someone a prophet as a Plan B.”
“And she was a judge,” Charity said. “What’s the point?”
“I think the point is that when someone hesitates, when they lose the faith or their faith falters, they aren’t going to be rewarded.” This was from Donna. She looked to Sara for approval, but Sara was looking at Nicole.
Sara cleared her throat and took another sip of water. “Do you think that’s right, Nicole?”
Nicole didn’t know what to say, she didn’t know why Sara was singling her out. “I think it’s worth discussing. After all, if we didn’t know anyone’s gender in the story, or if it was strictly about two men, I think that’s what we’d take from it. That assurance is rewarded, and hesitance is punished.”
“They aren’t both men,” Sara stated.
“No, but how much do we think gender plays a role in it?” Charity asked.
“I’d say quite a bit,” said Sara. “God created men and women separately and for different purposes. If we were interchangeable, then why bother making us different at all?”
“That’s true,” said Charity. “So, what is the purpose of having a female prophet?”
“Perhaps it’s God’s way of telling women they’re worthy of being such. That we aren’t lesser,” Donna suggested.
“That,” Sara said, “is a good point. Of course, we aren’t lesser, we are distinctly different.” Sara allowed her gaze to fall away from Nicole and back to the room at large. “Deborah shows us that women can be devout and brave.”
Nicole was satisfied enough with this conclusion. She’d been thinking for weeks about how she might take a larger role in the church, something not directly associated with the women’s group. She believed there must be more for her, more that God wanted from her. Every day her husband left for the fields and every evening he returned, and he was content. On Sundays he would rest. They would go to church and then Nicole would make a big Sunday Meal—some sort of roasted meat with vegetables—and he would sigh because his contentment was so enormous he had to let some of it out or else he might explode. And Nicole was fine. She was not unhappy, but neither was she content. The rest of the women would chat about their sewing projects and their children’s extracurriculars and the volunteering they did at the food bank that week…and they, too, seemed fulfilled.
After she left Sara’s house that night, Nicole drove to the church and sat in the parking lot, her attention focused on that Holy blue light. If she stared into it long enough, the world around her would shimmer and blur at the edges, become less real. Sometimes she would see shapes moving in the darkness around her, probably animals scurrying off to their dens for the night. Tonight, she thought about Deborah. The world recessed and the blue light convexed toward her, swallowed her.
The silence of the evening hummed. There was no breeze, and all the leaves were more still-life than actual life. Nicole stopped breathing because the sound of the air whispering through her respiratory system was sacrilegious.
The smallest tappity-tap skittered across the hood of her car. The sound snapped her back into reality, and she blinked a few times to clear the residual blue-red from her vision. Another clatter, and this time Nicole saw a pebble skip across the hood. She looked around the dark parking lot but didn’t see anyone. Grabbing her keys from the ignition, she stepped out into the night and hugged herself as defense against the newly brisk air.
“Hello?” Nothing but silence answered her.
“Probably a squirrel,” she muttered, and the sound of her own voice calmed her. She stepped toward the woods. Not so much to search for the source of the rocks as to get a better look at the cross. As Nicole neared the forest, she heard a rustling out amongst the trees. The wind returned and whistled past her ears; she squinted to see what might be out there, and for a second, she thought she heard her name carried on the breeze. The back of her neck prickled as the phantom voice of the reverend echoed in her mind. There are witches in the woods.
“No thanks,” Nicole whispered, and jogged back to her car. For the first time she wondered how far the woods went, how many miles of unbroken wilderness existed right here at the edge of the most human of all buildings—the church.
Congratulations Jessica!!