White Is for Witching

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… show more.

This lyrical and unsettling novel is about the things we inherit, both from our families and from the world around us, and I was firmly under its spell from the very first line. I was particularly enamored of Oyeyemi’s characterization of the Silver house, a monstrosity of a building (and one of the book’s narrators) that literally consumes the women who live within its walls. What, after all, is trauma but a kind of haunting, and what is the mind but a kind of house?

This is a brilliant take on the haunted house tale.

The writing slips from one point of view to another smoothly but unsettlingly, revealing slivers of the secrets that the Silver family are keeping from each other, sometimes even taking on the persona of the house itself.

And the way whiteness is used—as a symbol, as a concept, as an identity—is unique and truly frightening. It’s something that the characters devour until it devours them.

White Is for Witching is, on the surface, a story about a gothic haunted house, but it opens with a reference to “Snow White”—“Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple / (to stop her speaking words that may betray her)”—and conjures that tale throughout the novel. Collapsing witching, whiteness, and outright racism, White is for Witching suggests that the same racial superiority undergirds “Snow White,” where the eponymous character is celebrated for her whiteness, implicitly naturalized as beauty when she is identified as “fairest in the land.” White is for Witching, like Oyeyemi’s other fairy-tale novels, rewrites… show more.

A scary, clever novel about witchy women that takes in big themes: mental and physical illness, grief, racism, nationalism. Oh, and a haunted house with its own voice. The themes are tragic, but the telling is often funny. It’s the story of Miranda, a young white woman who suffers from the eating disorder “pica”, her friend Ore, a black Cambridge student who both loves and fears Miranda, and Miranda’s family and community: the Silvers, father, brother, and Miranda’s dead mother; the Eastern European kids at school; the Yoruba cook; Miranda’s terrifyingly magical ancestors. Like me, you might have to read… show more.