The Heart of A Witch
by Judith Hawkes
from Signet
In the small town of Green Hollow, New York, the Lockley Arms hotel stands as the meeting place for a coven of witches. When the hotel's owners perish in a mysterious car accident, the coven's leader searches for suitable replacements, for the coven membership must equal 13. The teenage twins who live across the street from the hotel volunteer to join the witches's circle. But during their apprenticeship, an evil force kidnaps several of the town's little boys, and the coven must pool its power to combat this sinister threat.
Julian's House
by Judith Hawkes
from Signet
This suspenseful haunted-house tale--praised by the New York Times for its "passages rich with descriptive beauty, complex with philosophical theorizing and seductive with hard (and tantalizing) information"--is a rich elaboration on the premise of parapsychologists trying to document ghost behavior. In this instance the researchers are a recently married (and sexually repressed) young couple who move their high-tech equipment into a Victorian house with the requisite history of bumps in the night. They are prepared to encounter supernatural phenomena, but not at all prepared to examine their own psyches. When the house starts acting as a sounding board for their neurotic conflicts, it's not clear whether actual ghosts are acting as interactive mirrors, or if the house is simply a big Rorschach inkblot for the projections of a troubled marriage. Judith Hawkes unfolds all the chilling complexity of the puzzle, and leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.
My Soul to Keep
by Judith Hawkes
from Signet
Start with a leisurely summer in a mountain valley in eastern Tennessee, where gnarled apple trees in the misty morning evoke thoughts of gnomes in sinister fairy tales, and where spirited horses beckon for long trail rides. Throw in a bunch of friendly country dwellers who host enthusiastic barn dances and hint darkly about stills hidden in the woods. Then imagine all of this as experienced through the eyes of a nervous New York City photographer, a divorced woman with her small boy. Sex with a handsome cousin and ample photographic opportunities seem to promise a restful summer for this woman, but when her son starts to hang out with an "imaginary" playmate, things go sour quickly. It's another ghost story from Judith Hawkes--not as brilliantly nuanced and tightly wound as Julian's House, yet just as richly descriptive, and satisfying in a lazy sort of way.
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