7/20/26

It was fifty seven degrees fahrenheit here along the river when I woke up this morning — middle of July. They say it will get up to 84 later today. Even the weather has dispensed with any pretense of normalcy in what’s left of our time.

I’ll be on the road from today until the end of the month, with signings in Brooklyn and Indianapolis, checking in on Grandma and doing/fixing some stuff around her house in West Virginia, some charity-related business in Virginia, and visiting some dear friends in Kentucky. I will have WiFi at most places where I rest for the night, but will be behind the wheel in Red Sonja during the day, and driving is not conducive to typing. Therefore, while I intend to continue the Women In Horror Year feature here on the Blog, updates may happen in the evening, rather than mornings, and there may be a few more days off than normal. And the entries themselves may be shorter than normal, depending on free time.

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Women In Horror Year: Day 86

Witch House by Evangeline Walton

Out of Print

When Elizabeth Stone sought the aid of Dr Gaylord Carew to save her child, Betty-Ann, from strange and terrible danger, he soon discovered that a malign and horrible influence was at work in the lonely house off the New England coast. The others in the house — Joseph, Quincy, and Zoia — maintained that Betty-Ann suffered tantrums; Betty-Ann herself believed that the evil ghost of old Miss Sarai reached across the divide to torment her. The things that happened to Betty-Ann suggested sorcery to Dr Carew, and when he sought to combat them, he found the vengeful influence behind them turned upon him as well.

No discussion of the history of women and their role in horror fiction would be complete without a mention of Evangeline Walton’s Witch House, first published by the legendary Arkham House in 1945 as a 3,000 copy hardcover. It is notable for being the first full-length novel published by them, as well as the first work written by a woman published by them. While much has been made in the decades since (by historian Robert Weinberg and others) about how the novel was “Arkham House’s greatest flop” (because it took eighteen years for that 3,000-copy print run to sell out), I don’t think I’ve ever seen or read an examination of what a deeply personal book this must have been for Walton to write. We know that:

Walton suffered chronic respiratory illnesses as a child, and was privately or self-taught at home. Her parents separated and divorced in 1924. Growing up and living with her mother and her grandmother and witnessing her parents’ marital difficulties roused a natural feminism in Walton.

and

Treated as a child with silver nitrate tincture for frequent bronchitis and severe sinus infections, Walton, who had extremely fair skin, absorbed the pigment of the tincture, causing her skin to turn blue-gray and darken as she aged.

You see a lot of this between the words in Witch House. One of the protagonists of this late-Gothic haunted house novel — young Betty-Ann — suffers from a number of health maladies, and there is possibly a malignant, unseen presence at their source. These segments of the book ring so true and so natural, that it is clear to me, at least, that she was tapping into her own childhood struggles. That natural feminism runs through the narrative, as well.

Witch House has seen a number of editions since that initial Arkham House release, including an American mass market paperback from Del Rey, a British mass market paperback that included a 20,000-word prologue that was cut from the original edition, and a recent Centipede Press hardcover that used the text from that British paperback edition and included a wealth of extras, including chapters from an unpublished novel and several short stories. You can find that edition for anywhere from $100 to $200. An Arkham house edition will cost you around the same, depending on condition. The paperbacks go for far less, if the seller doesn’t know what they have. Well worth tracking down, particularly if you want to see the transition from Gothic to Horror as it played out in real time. Here are the covers to be on the lookout for.