December 2024
White is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi
The chilling, white cover of this book definitely sparked my interest as an option for a wintry horror book. Upon doing some research and learning there were queer elements in the book, it dawned on me as the perfect choice to end 2024’s Readalong, especially since the book also didn’t seem too long. I read Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread several years ago, so I was a bit familiar with her as an author. Gingerbread had been a challenging read, and I remember it took me quite a while to get into the book and find my rhythm reading it. It was a similar situation with White is for Witching. At first, the unique narrative style of the book makes it difficult to track who is telling the story - Miranda, Eliot, the house, etc. It took some effort thinking through the details of what I was reading and piecing it together to give me some timeline of the twins’ lives in Dover.
However, I am SO GLAD that I continued reading the book and didn’t quit. The book was riveting and unsettling and familiar and frightening all at once - I’ve never read anything quite like it. Once I got past the setup of the family and their backstory, suddenly the book was just tumbling towards the end and I couldn’t read fast enough!
Spoiler Warning: The rest of the review contains what some might consider spoilers.
Additional Warning: This review felt chaotic to write (and chaotic to read back), so apologies.
The narrative style of the book was challenging as I mentioned above, but it’s also what added to the charm of the novel and gave me a deeper understanding of Miranda and Eliot and the chaos that can come with mental illness. It was also starkly contrasted with the more consistent and uniform narration of Ore’s sections of the book, who slowly became less clear in her thinking the longer she spent with Miranda and stayed in the Silver’s house. It was frustrating at first, yes, but by the end of the book, it was one of the elements I appreciated most about the book.
The horror element of Miranda’s pica and the racist legacy of the Silver women was obviously woven throughout the book, with ghostly women speaking to Miranda in her mind and the house connecting with her, even as far away as when she went to Cambridge. There is definitely some question as to whether any of this is really happening, or whether it’s all in Miranda’s mind and just made up - by the end, I still couldn’t really tell.
Eliot, presented as the seemingly ‘normal’ twin at first, is also horrifying in his own way. His strangeness and possessiveness of Miranda (despite constantly making it seem as though she was overly possessive of him) was very unsettling. His teenage girlfriend Emma even goes so far as to turn herself into a copy of Miranda while drunk one night, chopping off her hair because she feels as though she can’t quite compete with his twin sister (I’ll come back to her and the red cigarettes later). Eliot has an obsession with Miranda’s college girlfriend, Ore, that goes frighteningly deeper than the reader initially realizes - he doesn’t just find her to be a cute friend of his sister, but instead is the photographic subject of nighttime stalking around the Cambridge campus. He is constantly preoccupied with her appearance, particularly her legs, and there is an incestuous flavor to his sexual interactions with Ore even after knowing that she is more than just a friend to Miranda, as though the twins share even their love interests with each other.
Ore was my favorite character in the entire book - she grounds the reader as the book shifts to the next stage of the twins’ life, giving an outside perspective into Miranda’s unusual behavior and further descent into illness. Her identity as a Black girl adopted by white parents isolates Ore from the other characters in the book even further aligns her further with Sade and the refugee victims in Dover, and gives a greater contrast to Miranda, who blends in (to the point of being invisible most of the time). Ore is real and relatable, from the moment she’s introduced as a nervous Cambridge applicant right up until the end when she flees Miranda’s house.
Once part of the book that was strange to me was the soucouyant - although it was stated that Ore read these folk tales of a female vampire-esque creature as a child, the sudden integration of the soucouyant into Miranda’s identity seems a bit random. I couldn’t tell if Sade was also specifically trying to ward off a soucouyant, or if she was just more concerned about ghosts and spirits, but maybe she was the connecting factor that linked the soucouyant to the Silver’s house. Miranda and Eliot have practically no prior connection to Caribbean culture or folklore, so for Miranda to embody that identity (either in herself or in the previous Silver women) felt out of place. Their mother, Lily, was killed violently in Haiti - that’s the only connection I can identify that might have changed the way the Silver spirits interact or appear to others, but if that is the connection then it wasn’t clear.
I enjoyed making a connection between this book and elements of Dracula, with Whitby and Dover having similar coastal environments and appearance, and the vampiric creature focusing its attention on a mentally frail, ghostly female character. I don’t know if these connections were purposeful or not, but they added atmosphere and furthered that sense of dread I felt as I got further and further into the story.
Oh, and coming back to Emma and her red cigarettes.
The early conflicts with a mysterious female attacker and several refugees never really felt fully addressed to me. There were strong hints that Miranda was committing these crimes, maybe unconsciously or in a dream state, or being controlled by the house in some way, but that theory isn’t confirmed for me. When an attacked refugee is confronted with a photograph of Miranda to identify, he claims he doesn’t recognize her, but that his attacker had similar hair and smoked red cigarettes. The book, particularly Eliot, makes a specific effort to repeat the fact that Miranda doesn’t smoke at all. Additionally, there is a focus on Emma, during the night where she cuts her dark hair to look like Miranda, smoking red-tipped cigarettes. Miranda’s choice of red or pink lipstick is a solid aspect of her physical appearance, suggesting not just blood (vampire?), but also that this lipstick might stain regular white cigarettes. It seems random for Emma to be the one killing refugees, since overall she isn’t the biggest of characters, so my thinking was that maybe Emma saw Miranda smoking these lipstick-stained cigarettes and smoked them as another element to copy Miranda in hopes of winning Eliot’s affection. Therefore, does that mean that Miranda is the attacker? It would fit with the overarching theme of the Silver women and the house’s racism. But, this storyline gets dropped mostly when Miranda goes to Cambridge, so I really didn’t know what to make of it overall.
While reading this book, so many questions were constantly rising up for me about the characters, plot lines, themes, etc. but every time I tried to follow the thread of a new theory or idea, it would fall out of my grasp and I’d have to start all over again. Although the book was thoroughly enjoyable for me to read, and I would recommend it to other fans of horror books with these elements, I’m left feeling as though parts of the story are just unfinished.