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Book: “The Root Witch” by Debra Castaneda
Publishing Info: Second Rodeo Books, September 2022
Where Did I Get This Book: I own it.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: A beautiful forest. A terrifying legend.
It’s 1986. Two strangers, hundreds of miles apart, grapple with disturbing incidents in a one-of-a-kind quaking aspen forest.
Knox is a new Forest Service ranger assigned to a vast, remote territory in Utah.
Sandy is a producer fighting for her place in a tough TV newsroom.
Both have heard about the shadowy figure believed to menace visitors to the forest. When a man disappears and reports of the Root Witch begin coming in, Knox and Sandy are plunged into a living nightmare.
Their lives converge on Halloween. Sandy sends a news crew to investigate the sightings. But when the team goes missing, and a shocking video surfaces revealing the ghastly truth, Knox and Sandy face the biggest decision of their lives.
Review: I’ve spoken of this before, but my favorite horror movie of all time is “The Blair Witch Project”. I remember seeing it in the theater when I was 14, and how transformative the experience was for in when it came to horror. I think that my adoration of this film has really molded my tastes and preferences when it comes to horror as a whole, and nature horror/survival horror is near and dear to my heart. I don’t remember how I stumbled upon “The Root Witch” by Debra Castaneda, but it had been sitting on my Kindle for a couple of years before I stumbled upon it while cleaning up my storage. When I saw it I had an ‘oh yeah, this sounded like “The Blair Witch Project’ moment, and decided then and there to finally take it on.
I’ll start with what I did like. For starters, the premise alone is great: there’s an aspen clone forest in Utah (in real life it’s a real place known as Pando) that is rumored to have some kind of dark entity stalking it referred to as The Root Witch. In 1986 a rookie forest service ranger named Knox moves into a cabin near the forest with his restless young wife, while a Salt Lake City newsroom producer named Sandy, hoping to prove something, wants to send a team into the forest to do a story on the urban legend. The team goes missing, their tapes are found, and something otherworldly is lurking. All of this was solid and absolutely clicked for me. I really enjoyed Sandy’s storyline in particular, as her constant roadblocks in her career, usually due to misogyny, are very real, and because of this her motivations are completely understandable, which in turn makes her guilt over her missing crew all the more stressful. I also really love some good urban legend horror, and the background that Castaneda puts into the Root Witch lore was very enjoyable, and with all of that in mind when we DO get some answers (in the form of found footage described moments) I was very satisfied with the execution.
But there is a flip side to this, which brought the story down a bit for me. I really liked the due diligence of describing the Root Witch lore and legend, but we don’t really get much direct action with The Root Witch itself. We rely mostly on descriptions, or aftermath moments with dead things being discovered, but in terms of actual building suspense with in the moment reveals? Not so much. I did like the video once we got there, but I had hoped for more scary and tense moments instead of a lot of build up for Knox and Sandy. Had there been a more even distribution of build up AND satisfying payoff, I would have enjoyed it more, but as it is, it just felt uneven and unsatisfying. And on top of that, I wasn’t nearly as invested in Knox’s story, which was a little ironic given that I fully anticipated to enjoy the path following the ranger. But I thought his wife was a bit grating, there was a side plot with a rancher that wasn’t as fleshed out as I had hoped it would be, and there weren’t enough forest moments with him. I just needed more action!
“The Root Witch” was a bit of a disappointment, but I think that I may try out more stories from Debra Castaneda. There is so much promise here, and I would be curious to see if it comes out in other spooky tales.
Rating 6: I really liked the premise and it had some great moments of found footage transcriptions, but I wish that we had more interactions with the Root Witch instead of aftermaths.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Root Witch” is included on the Goodreads list “Botanical Gothic and Plant Horror”.
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