Wytches

I'd love to own a physical copy of Scott Snyder's 'Wytches'. The illustrations by Mark Simpson aka 'Jock', are dark and alluring. There's diminished pleasure in flipping through a graphic novel in digital format. But space. Haizzz. (Reviews here, here, and here.)

Thanks for flagging the series in your mid-March library loot, Sharlene!

The series now stands at six chapters (or 'issues' as some would prefer to call it), wrapping up the first arc in Volume 1. The seventh chapter and onwards of the highly anticipated Volume 2 haven't got a release date yet. Maybe Halloween 2016. Dunno. Anyway, it makes it fantastic timing for me to catch up and digest this first arc before the story shifts.

The chapters weave between 2011 and 2014 and present-day. We follow how the Rook family tries to protect their daughter Sailor from her nemesis Annie who bullied her and somehow disappeared in 2011. Years later, they have moved to a new town of Litchfield in New Hampshire, hoping to start over.

Litchfield is a disturbing town where dark secrets and the supernatural sink deep into the people's consciousness. In exchange for supernatural boons, people could pledge another to the wytches in the woods. The wytches live underground, beneath a huge tree with ginger root clumps. A strange green liquid is sprayed onto the pledges to mark them. Then the wytches will come to claim their prizes.

In a twist, we learnt that Sailor's mother Lucy has pledged her in order to protect herself and her husband. Apparently the wytches cook pledges in a cauldron and eat them. Sailor is taken, and her father Charlie is horrified at what his wife did, and rescued Sailor. In retaliation during the ensuing battle where Sailor's evil classmates turned up to insist on her fulfilling the pledge and the howling wytches surrounded them, Sailor pledged all these classmates. A slaughter was inevitable.

I wonder what Volume 2 will hold. Read this first volume at night out on the balcony on a breezy cool night. It was midly creepy. Now I can't get the harsh sounds of the wytches' "chit-chit-chit-chit-chit, chit-chit-chit" out of my head. Imagined the rustling of trees to be from these evil wytches.