Witchcraft for Wayward Girls

A Southern Gothic, feminist horror set in a maternity home in the 1970s from Grady Hendrix, the New York Times bestselling author of How To Sell A Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group.
The next twisted unforgettable horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support Group.

'A chillingly addictive Southern Gothic tale'
COSMOPOLITAN

‘I did an evil thing to be put in here, and I’m going to have to do an evil thing to get out.’

They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood House in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, 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. There, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to keep her baby and escape to a commune. Zinnia, a budding musician who plans to marry her baby’s father. And Holly, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Every moment of their waking day 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.

‘So twisted and smart’
CATRIONA WARD

'Terrifying, darkly funny . . . and deeply relevant'
SIMONE ST. JAMES

Grady Hendrix is a New York Times bestselling novelist and screenwriter who owns too many paperbacks and not enough shelves. He's the author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, and many more, including Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the seventies and eighties that won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction. (All the paperbacks are for "research" and he needs them.) His books have sold over two million copies and have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City and will die there, too, probably crushed to death beneath piles of those paperbacks.