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Elizabeth is ostensibly a novel about witchcraft, the eponymous character's embrace of her family's dark heritage, but it could go under the title American Psycho, for Greenhall traps us within the consciousness of one utterly without empathy, one who assumes the worst of people, always. One who coolly weighs the world and its people and finds them all wanting.

It's only to Frances, a 16th c. “cunning person” and matriarch of a witching dynasty, to whom Elizabeth holds any allegiance. Frances appears to Elizabeth in mirrors, awakening her latent powers and nurturing her talents, while Elizabeth pretends to the ordinary life of a well-to-do fourteen-year-old, living with her grandmother in a house of faded opulence.

Also living with her is James, Elizabeth's uncle, who maintains an affair with his teenage niece. Strip away the book's supernatural elements and you have a Lolita-like affair but told from Lolita's point of view. At first glance, James and Humbert Humbert would seem to have much in common, including narcissism and cultured sophistication (James admires Don Giovanni), not to mention their noisome appetites. But it's Elizabeth and Humbert who have the stronger connection. They are united by a thoroughgoing superciliousness that justifies, in their minds, a contempt for the commonplace, giving eventual license to the harms they cause.

This slim chiller was reissued by the great Valancourt Books, which is offering free shipping on all its books during the duration of the coronavirus pandemic. Buy from them directly at www.valancourtbooks.com, or support your local bookstore at www.bookshop.org

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