Book of Shadows by James Reese

From the Publisher

Alone among the young girls taught by nuns at a convent school in nineteenth-century France, orphaned Herculine has neither wealth nor social connections. When she's accused of being a witch, the shy student is locked up with no hope of escape ... until her rescue by a real witch, the beautiful, mysterious Sebastiana. Swept away to the witch's manor, Herculine will enter a fantastic, erotic world to discover her true nature — and her destiny — in this breathtaking, darkly sensual first novel.

Kelley Armstrong

A spellbinding tale with a truly enchanting heroine.

Caleb Carr

A novelist of immense talent and promise,and a story that seeps into the mind like a potion.

Diana Gabaldon

Expertly researched,lavishly detailed and lushly written...an atmosphere so vivid you can smell it,and remarkably striking characters.

Tampa Tribune

Darkly erotic...lavishly told...Prepare to put your life on hold for 468 pages and immerse yourself.

Publishers Weekly

A sinuous plot studded with uncanny surprises snakes through this nontraditional period gothic. Its first-person narrator, Herculine, seems cut from the same cloth as the heroines of classic sensationalist fiction: vulnerable, tragically orphaned and, at the tale's outset, immured in the tedious routines of early 19th-century French convent life. But Herculine's self-consciousness about unnamed physical endowments suggests an unusual heritage whose dimensions become known when a schoolgirl prank leads to shocking revelations of the "unnatural" and accusations of witchcraft. Before she can be tried, she is spirited to safety by witch Sebastiana d'Azur, a "Soror Mystica" who tutors her in the enchantments necessary for Herculine to fulfill her destiny: to liberate Father Louis and his lover, Madeleine de la Mettrie, two elemental spirits chained to earth. Herculine's instruction proves a pretext for relating elaborate 18th-century chronicles of Louis's trumped-up trial for witchcraft and Sebastiana's tutelage in the mysteries of the Craft, and it is through these tales that the novel comes into its own. Reese loosens restraints, making the novel more than a mere historical pastiche and jarring the reader with vivid accounts of Louis's cruel torture, the passion of Sebastiana's education and the revolting inhumanity of the French Revolution's reign of terror. Overlong and distractingly plotless, these interludes nevertheless impress, levering out in deceptively simple language the eroticism and violence smoldering beneath traditional gothic fustian. Though loosely episodic, the novel achieves a historical sweep that distinguishes Reese as a star pupil in the Anne Rice school of dark sensuality. (Mar. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In this debut novel, Reese explores the dark world of obsession and magic in 18th-century Brittany. Orphaned Herculine has grown up in the narrow confines of a French convent. She knows that she is different and is both ashamed and afraid of these differences. Shocking events at the convent cause her to reevaluate her identity, as she is drawn into a web of sorcery and betrayal. Befriended by witches, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures, Herculine struggles to find a place for herself in the world. Should she help these new friends or run away as fast as she can? This novel shows potential that is, alas, unrealized. A confusing setting and plot are complicated by Reese's insistence on developing minor characters at the expense of his protagonist. Lengthy tangential chapters serve only to muddy the waters further. Not recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/01.] Laurel Bliss, Yale Arts Lib. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Debut supernatural vampire/witch superdrama whose lesson seems to be that sex is better when (1) it's a sin, (2) it hurts, and (3) it involves barely adolescent girls. Our nameless narrator of variable gender starts as the prize pupil in a generic European girls' prep school, but it's not long before she's dabbling in sexual experimentation with a classmate. Merde! She discovers that she likes being struck, that she ejaculates "nightsalt" in wet dreams, etc. The school administrators accuse her of being a demon and lock her up, conveniently, in Satan's library. She thinks to kill herself when she learns that she will be tried at the hands of—double-merde!—men, but then she realizes that she really is a witch and maybe it's not so bad. After all, she gets to have sex with a demon priest who had once been burned at the stake (no biggie), and is soon introduced to four demon saviors, who tutor her but also need her help to escape their mortal coils. She also learns that she might not be strictly female after all, but nevertheless engages in a sexual relationship with a servant named Romeo while she reads the shadow books of her saviors (the Cliff's Notes of witchdom) and prepares to write her own. She eventually helps her demon pals escape, becomes a man, and sails off to America. Mon Dieu! More often than not, the author seems to be performing self-therapy on his own fixation with lesbian witches. But demons arguing Aristotle and Plato do not save prose whose intent is only to titillate. Fear may be exciting, and pain may be secretly enjoyable, but when young girls refer to their vaginas as "nether mouths" it seems nothing more than garden-variety porn. Harry Potter for oversexed Wiccafreaks. Masochists, hermaphrodites and nun-fetishists unite!

What People Are Saying

Anne Rice
It’s marvelous to have one so eloquent exploring and transcending the gothic genre.

Product Details

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Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Early Life, Such as It Was

In 1812, I went to “the Stone,” the holy house at C___, a village straddling the ill-drawn borders of Brittany and Normandy, dependent upon the grace of the Church. For the next twelve long years, the nuns who had taken me in made it plain: if I lived cleanly, devoutly, as they did, I might one day see the face of God.... But no; lately I've seen only Satan. The sweet girlish faces of Satan.... Ah, but I don't mean to self-dramatize; I mean only to situate you, Reader, and so...

My world was the domain of C___, its sloping fields bounded by picket fences and, beyond, hedges and waves of mounded stones. That place was comprised of a series of outbuildings surrounding three larger, two-story buildings conjoined by galleries, some shuttered, others open. It was hewn of darkly mottled stone and gray slate. Surrounded by tall stands of deciduous evergreens, the place seemed to leech the very light from the sky.

Set loosely at right angles, and forming an inner yard at the center of which rose a statue of the Sacred Heart, the three main buildings were these: St. Ursula's Hall, a large and featureless space sometimes used for assembly, beneath which were the kitchen and dining hall; the dormitory, set above a bank of classrooms, nuns' cells, and offices as well as our Pupil's Parlor, where the girls received their visitors; and the third building, which housed the main chapel, Our Lady of Prompt Succor, as well as the sisters' chapel, the main library, and several lesser libraries. Beyond the chapel sat thedairy and the stables. Beyond the stables was a graveyard, where we buried our dead in private. Too, there was the laundry, a dovecote, a carpenter's shop, a smithy, and the building known as the Annex, which sat empty and unused all my years at C___. White pickets formed our inner borders; and it was within these pickets that we girls, twice daily, surrounded the Sacred Heart to take our exercise. The youngest girls formed an inner circle, so near the statue as to see our Lord's incarnadine heart amid the marble folds of His robes. If the weather was fair, it was in the yard, thusly circling our Savior, that we would stand with arms akimbo, bending at the waist, doing this and that, careful always to keep one foot firmly planted on the ground, “as befits a lady.” In winter, we would crowd under the galleries and stretch and bend as best we could. My position in these drills was fixed: I had always to stand nearest the kitchen, lest Sister Brigid need me for some duty therein.

Understand: I was the sole scholarship student at C___, and I was made to work for my keep. Usually in the kitchen, sometimes in the laundry or gardens. Though Sister Isadore ran the Lower School, and Sister Claire de Sazilly the Upper (both answering to Mother Superior Marie-des-Anges), it was to old, enfeebled Sister Brigid that I reported. I loved her; she was kind. Kind too was the extern I knew from an early age, Marie-Edith, who came to C___ from the village thrice weekly to help with meals; she also did our shopping, as the sisters were suspect of all worldly commerce. Indeed, it was I who lately taught Marie-Edith to read in my room off the kitchen.... Yes, I lived apart, at Sister Brigid's request, and I did not mind. The cellarer, Sister Margarethe, however, did mind: not only did I occupy her pantry but I deprived her of the root cellar dug into its floor and covered over with boards. Though it was barren and cold in winter and damp in summer, with its walls in constant sweat, the room suited me. It was private; and it was privacy I craved above all else. No novitiates came to see that my Bible lay beneath my pillow as I slept. No one woke me harshly at first light. Neither did the candles I burned through the night attract attention. And, blessedly, a pump sat just outside the kitchen door, and it was from this that I drew my bath water, bathing alone behind my closed door.

Not only did I have to work for my keep — and countless were the potatoes peeled, the corn shucked, the fish scaled and gutted... — I had to succeed academically. If I did not — and this was intimated, if never stated — I might be sent away to an orphanage or some lesser facility of the Ursulines.

And so I became an excellent reader at an early age. In time, no text was beyond me. And the books at C___.... So many wondrous works, though I remember too some particularly hateful theology and sheaves of impenetrable poetry.... I was perhaps ten when I began to study Greek under the tutelage of Sister Marie de Montmercy. I immersed myself in the language; but only until I discovered Latin, to which my allegiance shifted. Here was the language for me! So sensible, the construction of its sentences as satisfying as a puzzle perfectly done. I don't mean to say that I rambled about C___ with Aeschylus and Cicero tripping off my tongue, but fluency did come in time. Additionally, there were the hours devoted to the perfection of our French, of course — and her sisters, Italian and Spanish. I worked diligently on English and German in private; quite similar, the two, though I loved the myriad exceptions of the former and detested the guttural rattlings of the latter. For this, I relied solely on texts and guesswork, for none of the nuns spoke English and only one spoke German (ancient Sister Gabriella, as likely to nod off as to assist me with the nuances of pronunciation).

Mathematics, penmanship, geography.... These were easy and unexciting subjects, which I easily mastered...

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Early Life, Such as It Was

In 1812, I went to “the Stone,” the holy house at C___, a village straddling the ill-drawn borders of Brittany and Normandy, dependent upon the grace of the Church. For the next twelve long years, the nuns who had taken me in made it plain: if I lived cleanly, devoutly, as they did, I might one day see the face of God.... But no; lately I've seen only Satan. The sweet girlish faces of Satan.... Ah, but I don't mean to self-dramatize; I mean only to situate you, Reader, and so...

My world was the domain of C___, its sloping fields bounded by picket fences and, beyond, hedges and waves of mounded stones. That place was comprised of a series of outbuildings surrounding three larger, two-story buildings conjoined by galleries, some shuttered, others open. It was hewn of darkly mottled stone and gray slate. Surrounded by tall stands of deciduous evergreens, the place seemed to leech the very light from the sky.

Set loosely at right angles, and forming an inner yard at the center of which rose a statue of the Sacred Heart, the three main buildings were these: St. Ursula's Hall, a large and featureless space sometimes used for assembly, beneath which were the kitchen and dining hall; the dormitory, set above a bank of classrooms, nuns' cells, and offices as well as our Pupil's Parlor, where the girls received their visitors; and the third building, which housed the main chapel, Our Lady of Prompt Succor, as well as the sisters' chapel, the main library, and several lesser libraries. Beyond the chapel sat the dairyand the stables. Beyond the stables was a graveyard, where we buried our dead in private. Too, there was the laundry, a dovecote, a carpenter's shop, a smithy, and the building known as the Annex, which sat empty and unused all my years at C___. White pickets formed our inner borders; and it was within these pickets that we girls, twice daily, surrounded the Sacred Heart to take our exercise. The youngest girls formed an inner circle, so near the statue as to see our Lord's incarnadine heart amid the marble folds of His robes. If the weather was fair, it was in the yard, thusly circling our Savior, that we would stand with arms akimbo, bending at the waist, doing this and that, careful always to keep one foot firmly planted on the ground, “as befits a lady.” In winter, we would crowd under the galleries and stretch and bend as best we could. My position in these drills was fixed: I had always to stand nearest the kitchen, lest Sister Brigid need me for some duty therein.

Understand: I was the sole scholarship student at C___, and I was made to work for my keep. Usually in the kitchen, sometimes in the laundry or gardens. Though Sister Isadore ran the Lower School, and Sister Claire de Sazilly the Upper (both answering to Mother Superior Marie-des-Anges), it was to old, enfeebled Sister Brigid that I reported. I loved her; she was kind. Kind too was the extern I knew from an early age, Marie-Edith, who came to C___ from the village thrice weekly to help with meals; she also did our shopping, as the sisters were suspect of all worldly commerce. Indeed, it was I who lately taught Marie-Edith to read in my room off the kitchen.... Yes, I lived apart, at Sister Brigid's request, and I did not mind. The cellarer, Sister Margarethe, however, did mind: not only did I occupy her pantry but I deprived her of the root cellar dug into its floor and covered over with boards. Though it was barren and cold in winter and damp in summer, with its walls in constant sweat, the room suited me. It was private; and it was privacy I craved above all else. No novitiates came to see that my Bible lay beneath my pillow as I slept. No one woke me harshly at first light. Neither did the candles I burned through the night attract attention. And, blessedly, a pump sat just outside the kitchen door, and it was from this that I drew my bath water, bathing alone behind my closed door.

Not only did I have to work for my keep -- and countless were the potatoes peeled, the corn shucked, the fish scaled and gutted... -- I had to succeed academically. If I did not -- and this was intimated, if never stated -- I might be sent away to an orphanage or some lesser facility of the Ursulines.

And so I became an excellent reader at an early age. In time, no text was beyond me. And the books at C___.... So many wondrous works, though I remember too some particularly hateful theology and sheaves of impenetrable poetry.... I was perhaps ten when I began to study Greek under the tutelage of Sister Marie de Montmercy. I immersed myself in the language; but only until I discovered Latin, to which my allegiance shifted. Here was the language for me! So sensible, the construction of its sentences as satisfying as a puzzle perfectly done. I don't mean to say that I rambled about C___ with Aeschylus and Cicero tripping off my tongue, but fluency did come in time. Additionally, there were the hours devoted to the perfection of our French, of course -- and her sisters, Italian and Spanish. I worked diligently on English and German in private; quite similar, the two, though I loved the myriad exceptions of the former and detested the guttural rattlings of the latter. For this, I relied solely on texts and guesswork, for none of the nuns spoke English and only one spoke German (ancient Sister Gabriella, as likely to nod off as to assist me with the nuances of pronunciation).

Mathematics, penmanship, geography.... These were easy and unexciting subjects, which I easily mastered...