“What is a witch?” asks prolific and award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan in the introduction to The Book of Witches. Ultimately, he declares “a witch could be anyone” (p. xix) and thus be written by anyone, closing the introduction with his interest in representing a wide variety of different voices in the collection. The star-studded contributors list includes writers from several countries and a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. Each story offers its own particular take on the nature of witchcraft and those who perform it, though there are some commonalities that speak to the collection’s sense of witchery.

These witches are often, though not always, women. They tend to be on the outskirts of their societies—though they are not always located there. Most importantly, witchcraft here is about potentiality, about what might, may, must, can, or have been—or could still be. The stories imagine this matter of possibility in a wide variety of ways: as the chance for change, as lost opportunity, as sudden shift or arisen obligation.

These overarching thoughts about the nature of witches that the collection contains are presented indirectly rather than with explicit intention. Each individual story is about its own perspective on witchcraft, and the role of the potential in the nature of a witch emerges primarily from the combination of stories. The key to leading the reader into an apprehension of this aspect of witchcraft, though, is the collection’s second story, “Catechism for Those Who Would Find Witches,” by Kathleen Jennings. This story, which takes the form of an annotated “forgery” of a witch-finding manual, unfolds a witchcraft that is rooted in seizing the opportunity to pause, think, and look clearly on the world. In this way, the witches of “Catechism” can be found “among those who have been too-long governed” (p. 41). The heretical catechism draws the reader along to value the commitment to declaring “First, to be and become ungoverned and ungovernable […] Second, on arriving anew in this world, to set a candle for those who would follow” (p. 42). This story of a potential witch casts witchcraft as a liberatory potential. This is an orientation towards power and magic shared by several of the stories in the anthology.

In its more direct forms, this sort of feminist witchery characterizes Andrea Hairston’s narrative poem “Escape Artists” as well as Usman T. Malik’s “Night Riding.” “Escape Artists” dances down its lines of highly variable-length, using form to propel itself through the live burial of several innocent witches and an eventual refusal to permit the cycle to repeat. At its best, it musters all its poetic force to this project, such as when it declares, “I can’t imagine / Coming back from the dead / Of winter” (p. 117). In these moments, the propulsion of verse offers something to the otherwise fairly straightforward story on offer. “Night Riding,” meanwhile, performs a masterful bait-and-switch, seeming at first to be a story about the relationship between science and the supernatural before revealing the gendered violence that brought the witch into the story in the first place. The story’s narratorial voice is gripping and avoids cheap shocks, even as it delays the truth of what is really happening almost until the very last page. It also puts its style to the service of its themes, bringing to life easy cruelty from its opening lines:

My dear girl, believe it or not, you lucked out with me.

Few doctors will take on pain management patients. Many refuse without even looking at the file. The moaners and groaners, road traffic accidents, paralyzed spines, arthritic necks, depressed hypersensitive fibromyalgia types, narc seekers, autoimmune this and gluten-intolerant that—they eat up hours of your life without ever changing one iota of their lifestyles of habits. (p. 391)

At its close, on the other hand, the story offers pained power: “I could walk, but I could not fly. The bond between you and my to-mothers was a leash that held me to the ground, so the sky and darkness, the wings and night steed—my birthright—were denied to me” (p. 404). These are precision-crafted sentences.

Similarly, Ken Liu’s “Good Spells” is about magic-as-potential-for-freedom, imagining anti-capitalist resistance and the valorization of the human, even when those very impulses are subject to capture. It does so via characteristically tightly researched and intelligent prose, rich with allusion and clever without ever being precious. This is the story of a technology witch who wishes nothing more than to affirm the value of the human in an increasingly computerized, AI-optimized near-future setting. It comes together to affirm the possibility for positive change. It delivers its hope with clear eyes and care, imagining the limits of magic at the same time as scoping its potential.

More obliquely, the general thrust of the collection is feminist and egalitarian even when magic is not presented as primarily about seizing the potential for liberation but instead about any number of other kinds of possibility. Cassandra Khaw’s “Met Swallow” serves as a notable example of this tendency. Although this story, too, is about responding to gendered violence, its treatment of magic itself is about a broader range of possibilities than healing and revenge alone. The magic at the disposal of Khaw’s witches can achieve those things, but at the center of the story is a humbler magic—coping, growing plants, the possession of a witch’s dead body by a sympathetic fox spirit, conjuring enough to go through the motions of life. Nonetheless, as the fox spirit inhabits Amaranth, the possibilities of both ongoing life and having never died haunt the story and its witchcraft. An atmospheric piece, “Met Swallow” materializes magic as mourning, of both what might have been and what might not be.

My favorite story in this volume, Amal El-Mohtar’s “John Hollowback and the Witch,” picks up these threads and concludes the anthology on another note of witchcraft as redress and the unpacking of regret. El-Mohtar has frequently been praised for her lyricism, as in This is How You Lose the Time War with Max Gladstone (2019) and her collection of poetry and very short fiction The Honey Month (2010), which includes her Rhysling Award-winning poem “Peach-Creamed Honey.” That lyricism is on full display in “John Hollowback and the Witch,” especially in its moments of quiet and reflection. We hear the witch’s eyes are a “flashing blue” (p. 451)—and that “flashing” strikes out to bite with surprise. A bit later, but still early in the story, the witch instructs Hollowback to take a bite of an apple he has with him, but upon trying “He gasped, sick-drool pooling around his tongue, and turned away from it, panting—but could not drop it, though he felt it growing warm in his hand, echoing something thumping hard in his chest” (p. 457). The vibrancy and fluidity work together to bring this feeling to life lyrically.

But what really makes “John Hollowback and the Witch” shine is its viscerality and wisdom. The language is immediate, physical. When I first learned of John’s hollowed back, “Where spine and sinew were meant to make a bold line from neck to tailbone, they vanished instead into an oval cavity the size of a serving plate, lined with pale, soft skin” (p. 454), my skin crawled. I felt as though my own spine was being surgically extracted. John has come to the witch—we learn early on—in the hopes of having his back filled in, and that process too is communicated in language that is felt. The magic burns and slices, culminating when “bones jutted beneath his blackened skin like mountain peaks, twisted like serpents coiling,” (p. 472). The language brings this pain to vibrant life, hammers into the body of the reader the lessons John must learn about himself and his flaws, his errors and cruelty, as he is forced to confront them.

It is in this experience that the aforementioned wisdom adheres. “John Hollowback and the Witch” knows exactly what it wants to say and says it. Without giving too much away, the understanding presented by the story of regret, loss, healing, and the possibility of growth follows naturally from the events of the story. The witch knows what she’s up to and she knows just what kind of futures she is opening up when she re-fills John’s back. She replaces his hollow with the choices that led him to it. In turn, El-Mohtar knows precisely what she’s doing in allowing the witch to do so. By placing this as the final story, Strahan ensures that it sticks, further supporting the modes of thinking the story holds.

Not all stories in the anthology, however, are serious studies of ultimately benevolent witches. Some—like “The Unexpected Excursion of the Murder Mystery Writing Witches” by Garth Nix and “So Spake the Mirrorwitch” by Premee Mohamed—are fundamentally humorous, though those too tend towards an understanding of witchcraft as a seizing or foreclosing of what might be. Others fully embrace the image of the evil witch and the other sorts of potentiality inherent in such a threat. This tendency is best exemplified by Darcie Little Badger’s “The Liar” and Tobi Ogundiran’s “The Nine Jars of Nukulu.” In both of these stories, the witch is a frightening figure, a magic-thief who injures and murders in search of ever greater power. The particulars differ between these stories, as do the themes—Little Badger’s story is one of solidarity and balance where Ogundiran’s is about family and freedom and resentment—but they share an image of witchcraft as something that twists possibility, even in seeming to reserve the name “witch” for the thief of magic, not for all workers of the craft. These two stories are also reminiscent of those Native American and African (respectively) images of witches that I (in my admittedly limited experience) have encountered. Indeed, the broad cultural diversity implied by that range of backgrounds in the list of contributors is reflected in these and many other stories—Strahan’s authors are exploring the world’s full imagination of witchcraft, an action that is itself a harnessing of possibilities.

Usually this would be the part of the review where I synthesized everything I have said so far and offered a final assessment of a work’s success. But I’m not entirely certain. If I were simply issuing a recommendation, it would be yes—The Book of Witches would, for me, be worth its somewhat steep sticker price even if “John Hollowback and the Witch” were the only good story in it—and it is full of excellent stories. I have been fascinated by their picture of witchcraft as the magic of manipulated potentialities. That’s just the thing, though. I found that picture. Of course, as Roland Barthes reminds us in “The Death of the Author” (1967), the reader is always implicated in the meaning of a text. With The Book of Witches, though, I think that the reader has been truly handed the keys to the kingdom. These are not stories selected and arranged to construct a picture of the relationship between the witch and the possible. These are excellent stories about witches in the hands of a reader who just happened to be attuned to the shining thread of potential as he struggled to understand what The Book of Witches might be doing as a whole. Another reader might find an entirely different throughline in the multiple and multifaceted depictions of witches across these twenty-nine poems and stories.

You might choose to latch onto the vision of the witch-as-outsider in P. Djèlí Clark’s “What I Remember of Oresha Moon Dragon Devshrata,” or the simmering anger of Andrea Stewart’s “Her Ravenous Waters,” and then pluck those elements out of the witchcrafts of the stories that I’ve focused on here. And yet, in some way, if I found witchcraft to be a matter of the possible, then that openness, that failure of a collection of excellent stories to insist on any one answer to its editors’ guiding question, may just be the most witchy thing it could have done. Its mystery is its ultimate success.