Kirsty Logan on her latest novel Now She Is Witch

Kirsty Logan, the acclaimed author of the likes of The Gracekeepers, The Gloaming, and Things We Say in the Dark, has been brewing on her most recent novel for years. The result, out this month, is the latest in Logan’s landmark Gothic, twisted takes on fairytales and fantasy, following two young women – the witchy Lux and rage-driven Else – who, with nothing left to lose after immeasurable hurt, set out to take their revenge together.

Appropriately for the kind of dark, folkloric storytelling that long ago put Logan on the Scottish literary map, the inspiration grew from a question that had been haunting her for a long time: “I was brought to writing about witches by the idea of the ‘perfect victim’,” Logan explains. “For a long time, witches were thought of as evil creatures who made pacts with the devil and ate babies. Then they were reclaimed and cast as innocent healers and midwives who never did anything wrong. But I wanted to ask: why do they have to be wholly innocent or wholly evil? Does it have to be as simple as villain or victim? Witches show us that the world is more complicated (and indeed more beautiful) than a simple binary.”

The novel is set in the Middle Ages, an era to which Logan was deeply drawn, fascinated by the “disconnect between the solid reality of [people’s] daily lives and the fantastical tales they heard.” While she isn’t a historian, Now She Is Witch is a meticulously researched piece of fantasy, emerging from “entire notebooks full of weird, gory, beautiful, fantastical details,” Logan explains. The novel’s past setting was also an opportunity to explore the gendered power dynamics of witchcraft and obligatory femininity that Lux experiences, and to throw into relief the ways in which certain things haven’t changed. “One of the ways that Lux is an outsider is that she doesn’t get her period, so isn’t able to get pregnant,” Logan explains. “On one hand, this makes her safer in this world, as maternal mortality was very high. But it also marks her out as suspicious, as being a wife and mother was one of the few paths available to women.”

Now She Is Witch is rich with gendered symbolism, particularly through the figures of the wolf and the rabbit, that reoccur throughout. The wolf is implicitly masculine and considered a perfect warrior in Celtic mythology, one who leads and hunts and the “bringer of death, eternally hungry,” Logan says; the rabbit on the other hand represents the feminine, a symbol of fertility and abundance. Logan brings up the phrase “elle a vu de loup”, or “she’s seen the wolf,” French slang for having sex for the first time, and the Latin “lupa” meaning both whore and female wolf.

For Logan, “the novel is very much a story about desire, as well as about violence, hunger, superstition and light – the wolf is the perfect figure.” The wolf is also connected in fairytales, particularly in Little Red Riding Hood, as a symbol of sexual threat. In Now She Is a Witch, Logan delves into the duality of the predator wolf and prey rabbit, and how certain characters reverse their roles. However, she is also keen to point out the cyclical nature of the hunt and the moral quandary it poses. “The simplest way to gain power,” Logan says, “is to victimise someone more powerless than yourself.”

In Now She Is Witch, several characters have chosen their own names, a narrative choice that for Logan was an act of redefining. “One of the things I wanted to explore in the book is the power of naming, choosing and defining ourselves,” Logan explains. “If we don’t define who we are, then others will do it for us.” For Else, whose given name the reader never learns, this redefinition comes from a “series of changes she goes through; she feels that she has become ‘something else’.”

There is a latent queerness to this kind of redefinition that Now She Is Witch, leans into: exploring the inarticulability of queer identity at a time when it could not be named. Writing a historical fiction book as a contemporary author, Logan explains, can be a tricky balancing act. “[It was] a challenge to figure out how to convey a historically-accurate queer identity to a modern audience,” she says, “though I thought it was important to try.” The novel features a non-binary character, Ash, although they don’t use this term, which works to further destabilise the notion of the binary that is at the centre of the book. “Queer people have existed throughout history,” Logan adds, “and to pretend otherwise is naïve at best and dangerous at worst.”

This is ultimately what Logan hopes readers will take away from Now She Is Witch: that the world is more complicated and beautiful than a simple binary. “Throughout history people have been scapegoated and deemed the Other, and we see that just as much now as ever,” Logan says. “But it’s never as simple as Us and Them, and if someone is trying to tell us that it is that simple, we should question why.”

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Now She Is Witch is out on 12 Jan via Vintage

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