Now She is Witch: ‘Myth-making at its best‘ Val McDermid

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I must admit that I skipped through Lux's story part of the book as to me it didn't flow very well, a very different writing style.

A brilliant stand-alone story to read on cold, wintery nights with the wind howling and the rain pouring outside. They set out on a journey through the woods together, coming across a troupe of mummers who show her the power of stories - the way they can be shaped and moulded to fit with what we want to hear, the way we can become someone else entirely, and the way stories themselves can evolve across time into something entirely different. Now She Is Witch is a beautiful and twisted dark tale of feminine power in a time when a woman with power was deemed to be in league with the devil. I couldn’t help but feel the heavy burden on my chest when I realised; nothing much had changed since then. When the local village men come upon her house in the woods, claiming to be in need of tinctures, but clearly there to satisfy their other needs, a stranger named Else appears, alongside a wolf.The arrival of a mysterious stranger named Else, just as a group of locals look set to attack Lux in her garden, starts the novel off with a bang. Now She is Witch has me sleeping easy again in the knowledge that I can keep my self-appointed position as chair of the unofficial Kirsty Logan fanclub.

But when I say every cell in my body was shivering, shrieking and went into a max frenzy just like Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic when I heard the owl, That Owl, under my window I’m not even exaggerating. The mummers sections had a "Midsummer Nights Dream" feel about it, and loved the way that they were a band of waifs and strays. It's a dark story, and some truly vile and horrible things happen to the women in this book, but it never strays into gender-essentialist territory, which is what I usually loathe about those witchy feminist stories.Not just from a girl to a woman and then something so much more in the end, but her character almost felt like clay to me. From the snowy winter woods to the bright midnight sun; from lost and powerless to finding your path, Now She is Witch conjures a world where women grasp at power through witchcraft, sexuality and performance, and sometimes by throwing each other to the wolves.

Her work has been optioned for TV, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine. This is the skill in her storytelling, that I have another genre to add to the two listed at the start: mystery.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This beautifully, dark story sees Lux go through her darkest moments, with parts of the novel being written with no punctuation, as Lux talks to Else about her past, her trauma and what led her to where she was at the beginning of the book.

Although Logan’s take on it strikes some of the same beats, she made it feel fresher, darker and yet more tender than any I’ve read before. Her name is Lux, and when we first meet her she is standing in a garden of poisonous herbs above the remains of her recently buried mother, who has been unjustly executed for witchcraft. I liked the majority of "Now She is Witch" by Kirsty Logan, a very different witch story to those I've read in the past. A slow burning, sinister tale of witchcraft and wise women, with complex, powerful, female characters. It’s also about ghosts, grief, poisons and nature, motherhood, love in all its different forms and learning to trust in life again.Honestly, what I wouldn't give for a sliver, a morsel, a grain of sand in the oyster of this woman's writing-capability.