Excerpt from The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Minerva had studied and saved, researched her options and budgeted, spent countless days paging through the college guides and data sheets at the Benjamin Franklin Library—¬which contained information on American scholarships available to international students—¬until she'd found a way to make her grad school fantasies a reality.

Now she was slipping up.

The peacock cried again, as if urging her out. She grabbed her clipboard and headed to the front of the house. She waved at one of the undergrads, who was loading her car, and set off toward Briar Hall, cutting through Briar's Commons, which the students called the Witch's Thicket because a witch had supposedly lived there in the time of the Salem trials. Or else the Devil dwelled under a tree. The stories contradicted one another as all good oral narratives must.

Salem was a few train stops away from the college, but there didn't seem to be a real basis for the story about the witch. As for the Devil, he seemed to live everywhere in New England. There was a Devil's Rock and a Devil's Footprint and a Devil's Pulpit.

Devil or not, Briar's Commons had served as the inspiration for The Vanishing, so it had some artistic merit. She'd felt giddy the first time she looked out the window and saw it, recognizing it from Tremblay's novel.

A single narrow dirt path cut through Briar's Commons and connected the eastern dorms with the rest of the campus, or one could take a wider, better-¬kept road that snaked around the patch of trees and had actual lighting at night. Stone¬ridge College at one point had tinkered with the idea of leveling the whole area and making a parking lot or a new dorm or something or other. But it caused a panic among local nature enthusiasts and the more ecologically minded students. Instead, the college had expanded west and north. South lay the sea and a couple of stretches of sand that passed for beaches.

Minerva walked briskly along the oak-¬dimmed path, clipboard in one hand. She thought about Nana Alba's tales of witches and the particular tale that had haunted Minerva since childhood. The peacock's cry, the silence of the path, further increased her melancholy. She missed her great-¬grandmother, had never stopped missing her even though Minerva's mother said she would. Just like she'd said Minerva would grow out of her teenage blues.

She'd written to her mother that day. She tried to limit phone calls back home with the excuse that long distance was expensive, but in reality it was easier to pretend she was fine and happy when she was typing on the computer or mailing letters. She'd mailed a bunch of photos from around campus to her mother the previous week. That, plus the short email that discussed nothing of importance, should keep her happy. Minerva had no desire to discuss her problems with her mother, who believed herself a psychoanalyst after reading too many self-¬help books.

Minerva emerged in front of Joyce House, which had the honor of being the oldest structure on campus, built in 1750. It was shuttered, with renovations to begin next year. It dearly needed this renovation; the once picturesque structure was now dull and battered, but she found it entrancing. Often, when doing her rounds, she looked at its upstairs windows and felt an almost electric tug. It was the lure of history; she adored older buildings and was repelled by the new.

They said the building was haunted, but then people said the same of all the old dorms. It did not frighten her. A few months before, close to Halloween, she'd noticed a glow coming from one of the upstairs windows and had ventured inside in the company of a campus security officer. Someone had broken into the dorm and attempted a séance, but they'd run off, probably spotting Minerva when she was waiting for an officer to arrive and escort her inside. They'd left behind a Ouija board and a few candles. It was a fire hazard, and as a result security had boarded up the downstairs windows, since it was terribly easy to lift one open from outside. Minerva had never discovered the identity of the culprits.

Excerpted from The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Copyright © 2025 by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Excerpted by permission of Del Rey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.