A Review of C. J. Cooke’s “The Lighthouse Witches”
Some Kind of Fairy Tale
In the year 2012, the late, great British author Graham Joyce published a novel entitled Some Kind of Fairy Tale. It was the story of a young woman who goes missing, only to turn up years later though she hadn’t aged at all. The book isn’t perfect — if I recall correctly, there’s a silly subplot involving a missing cat — but it is an entertaining read, as are all of Joyce’s books that I’ve read (and there’s only a few that I haven’t, which means that he’s one of my favourite authors). Well, nearly 10 years later, another book is being published that has an almost identical plot point: the missing girl who shows up years later unaged. C. J. Cooke’s The Lighthouse Witches is that book, and it is an entertaining read, even if there are plot holes you could drive a truck through. It’s not quite as good as Joyce’s book, but if you’re looking for a counterpoint to Some Kind of Fairy Tale written from the feminine perspective, this novel is for you.
The Lighthouse Witches is told from varying viewpoints in the years 1998 and 2021, with a subplot set in the 1600s. The story is about a single mother, Liv, who is contracted to paint a rather strange, and possibly Satanic, mural on the inside walls of a lighthouse called The Longing on an island off the eastern shores of Scotland at the end of the 20th century. Tagging along are her three children, teenaged Sapphire (or Saffy for short), and Luna and Clover, who are just little girls. Flash forward to the future, and a thirty-something (and pregnant) Luna is looking for her mother and two sisters who vanished off the island in 1998. When Clover is found, she is still seven years old. She has marks on her that take the form of a date, 2021, and the legend of the island is that this means that the child is a wildling or an imposter who looks like Clover but is a fairy in disguise. In any event, Luna takes Clover to the island to find out the true reason for the events of 1998 and why Clover hasn’t aged. In the 1998 timeline, Saffy reads from a grimoire that is left in the home near the lighthouse where the family is staying, and it is partially a diary written in the 1600s that details witch burnings on the island.
As you can tell, there’s a lot of plots in this book, but it is also stuffed to the gills with atmosphere. You’ll feel the cool spray of the ocean and the nip of the night air as you read. It’s helpful that this book is being released in October 2021 as this is the type of thing you’ll want to read by the fireplace with a blanket pulled over you and your favourite chair. After a bit of a slow start, the novel picks up steam and motors on to a strange climax that sort of changes the tone of the book. There’s love, loss, and betrayal in these pages, and these elements add to a particularly enjoyable reading experience. Also, you might come to dislike these characters at first as they are all deeply flawed, but you’ll warm up to them and like them as the novel progresses. The background use of runes and animal bones make the novel also seem wistfully magical. The witches’ storyline is enthralling and captivating. So, there are things about this book that make it worthy of examination.
However, The Lighthouse Witches has some issues. For one thing, the segments set in the 1600s are written in a 21st-century writing style, and seeing that this is a diary, you’d expect it to be written in old-timey English — the way David Mitchell might have handled this narrative if we were holding the pen. The other thing that is particularly weird about this read is that — at a time when authors are bending over backward to set their novels in the recent past as they wouldn’t be plausible during the pandemic lockdowns of the years 2020 and 2021 — the 2021 portion of this novel doesn’t mention a pandemic at all! It is as though COVID-19 has never happened, which makes this portion of the read seem rather unbelievable. I suppose you could write the book off as being set in an alternate timeline, but it does still feel odd that a book being published and set in the current year wouldn’t address COVID in any manner. I suppose there’s some time before the dates could be changed upon the publication of this work, but even then galleys could have been sent out with the current-day timeline of the story being set in 2019, and it wouldn’t mess too much with the narrative. You’d just have to do a universal find and replace on the manuscript and change a few dates and the age of Luna.
Still, for all of its strengths and shortcomings, The Lighthouse Witches is not that bad of an experience. Even though it shares its plot and magical elements of European folklore with Some Kind of Fairy Tale, it is almost just as enjoyable of a book. It is dazzling magical and is even somewhat feminist as it tells its story largely from the perspective of women, sometimes in the first person singular. This is a book about the dangers of a patriarchal society and the misogyny that it harbours. However, you can also enjoy The Lighthouse Witches as a straight-up horror story or psychological thriller. There’s much to mull over here, even though I felt that the ending was a bit forced and rushed — I’ll say nothing further as I don’t want to spoil the book — and it holds a candle to the works of Graham Joyce. While The Lighthouse Witches is far from being original, it casts a spell. If you’re looking for a good potboiler to spend a fall evening with, this novel should do just the trick.
C. J. Cooke’s The Lighthouse Witches will be published by Berkley Publishing Group on October 5, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
