Water Shall Refuse Them by Lucie McKnight Hardy

I’ve not included an image of the cover of this book here for two reasons:

1) I wanted to get away from mooning over book covers just for one post (although… this one feels so good in your hands - Dead Ink are really good at covers like that, I’m discovering), and

2. I’ve already done a post with a picture of this one, so go read that!

Instead, have this fabulous quote from the beginning, taken from Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches.

Witchcraft sprouts up in this book rapidly, as you might expect for a book titled Water Shall Refuse Them.

The first mention of an “incantation” popped up on the page almost out of the blue and with very little foreshadowing in some ways; it jolted me and pricked my interest within a few pages, as did the mentions of a “head” held carefully on the lap of Nif, our viewfinder for this sticky, sepia-toned journey into the ‘70s.

I should say, though, that Nif is very much not against some chewy foreshadowing - she identifies a “hostile force” as the family car descends into a Welsh valley for the summer, and this image is lush: the Cortina teetering over a hilltop into a new (small) world full of potential for darkness. It’s not clear at this stage how much is real and how much is in Nif’s imagination, which I gathered early on is… witchy.

But witchiness isn’t the only imagery we have to contend with here: heat seeps through the plot; heavy, oppressive, the 1976 heatwave is here given an arsenal of metaphor to play with. Even the houses of the valley are like “flies on meat”.

Intentionally or not, this book paints Wales as an alien world, sometimes in ways that verge on uncharitable, although McKnight Hardy was raised there so I defer to her experience on this matter. I can’t lay claim to knowledge of what it is to be unwanted in a Welsh village, because my boyfriend is Welsh and therefore my experiences of the Valleys are of a fathomless, warm welcome from his mum and family. Having said that, my boyfriend has told me of the divides even within the country; as a South Wales native he has felt like an outsider in the North, so perhaps it’s no real stretch to see how Nif and her family could be puncturing a bubble, invading, on this occasion.

Plus, there are themes in this book that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced the strangeness of '“a fresh start” even if that fresh start doesn’t happen in Wales. I remember a friend who emigrated to Australia with her family at fourteen, and I remember her describing how shockingly weird it seemed, until she assimilated. I think she’s now more Australian than she was British, but it took time. That strangeness can even be less dramatic to have an effect: when I was 16, a last minute terror of moving 250 miles to live with my mother changed the course of my life completely. I often wonder how my life might be different if I’d made that move; it’s like a parallel universe despite only being as far as the South West of England.

So, it’s a rich seam (no mining-related pun intended; I am, after all, from a coal-mining town in the North), and Wales comes out as the perfect setting for this kind of seismic life shift: even the name of the village is practically unintelligible to Nif. As someone who is currently making a lame attempt to dysgu siarad Cymraeg, it’s something I can at least understand, if not identify with. It is also pretty convenient - it keeps the setting of Water Shall Refuse Them anonymous, so presumably no one Welsh village can claim any offence for the portrayal of insularity versus The Other on display here.

And Nif’s family is absolutely The Other. From Nif’s mysterious, self-ideated “Creed”, to the detachment her mother has towards her youngest child (and the bandages on his little knees), there’s already a sense of strangeness to them by page 12. This is an excellent example of cramming story in early but without giving anything away. This book practically forces you to read on, even when there are deep misgivings wriggling in your stomach about the whole enterprise.

And yes, this is a book about witchcraft, but only in some senses. It’s just as much a book about witch hunts, suspicions, a stranger comes to town disturbances in a place’s equilibrium. Superstition, faith… and the act of losing faith. It’s about the grief of a family, and gaps in memory, little rituals we use for comfort as much as for anything else.

You can tell research has gone into this, as much as imagination. History pops up where you least expect it - and for that reason alone let me warn anyone looking to escape C*v*d-*9 that the pre-Fire of London plague of the 1600s makes a large-looming guest appearance.

I finished this book at one o’ clock on an April morning, somewhere around witching hour. I was left with questions, like, what does it mean to be accused of being ‘other’, and does that mean something else when it turns out ‘they’ were right? And what punishment does someone deserve when they lie, or cheat, or love one of their children more than another?

This is by no means a ‘scary’ book if what you’re looking for is a racing heart and a jump scare overleaf. But if you like your folk horror with Wickerman claustrophobia and a creeping dread that settles like grease on your skin, and an ending that only satisfies in the ‘what might happen now’, then this might be the summer book of your witchiest dreams.