The Wicked Deep, by Shea Ernshaw

Curses, hauntings, possession, revenge...true love (or teenage instacrush, anyway). And witches. Don't forget witches (Witches, if you don't already know, are kind of my thing...and not the Harry Potter sort either, although I will always have a soft spot for Harry. Original 7 books only, though). All this is the setup for the events that transpire in Shea Ernshaw's new novel, The Wicked Deep.  

Two hundred years ago, Hazel Swan had the nerve to fall in love with the wrong man, the son of the lighthouse keeper. Hazel and her sisters, Marguerite and Aurora, had arrived in town months earlier and had set up a perfume shop. Perfume, female business owners making it on their own...all this was scandalous to the uptight townspeople. And it didn't help that the sisters were unusually charming and beautiful, stirring the hearts of all the men in town, married and single, old and young. So naturally the sisters were accused of witchcraft and drowned in the bay, because back then that's what one did when encountering a (so called) witch.

Unfortunately, this placed a curse on the town. And every summer since, the sisters have returned, possessing the bodies of local girls for the purpose of leading boys into the harbor to drown.  This is how it has always been. 

As this year's Swan Season Celebration approaches, a stranger arrives in town, determined to investigate his brother's disappearance. And when the drownings begin, so does the witch hunt. But local girl Penny Talbot knows how to stop the curse. But does she really want to? Because the truth is far more complicated than she, or anyone, wants to let on.

When I first hears about The Wicked Deep months ago, I knew I had to read it. Early reviews compared it to a mashup of Hocus Pocus (my absolute FAV witch movie) and Practical Magic (which I also love). In reality, The Wicked Deep was neither of these, but but it still was a fun story, albeit predictable. In fact, I guessed the Big Twist more than 50 pages before it was revealed. More than any existing witchy story, book or movie, the tone of the story recalled the paperback horror/suspense novels I devoured by the dozen when I was a teen back in the 1990s (Cooney, Cusick, Stine, etc. All those authors). Everything about the book was decidedly old school, and that's mostly what kept me reading, what made me enjoy the book as much as I did. 

I would absolutely recommend it. Like, totally! --AJB