Editorials
How ‘The Witch’ Illustrates Family and Community as Our Worst Enemies
Family can be a thing, right? We love them dearly, of course, but every once in a while, they make us question how deep that love reservoir really goes. Family members can annoy us, criticize us, and show us the worst parts of ourselves. They know us the best; therefore, they know exactly where to stick the knife and which direction to twist it.
Those are the moments that suck, and those are the moments The Witch turns into unfiltered dread. If we set aside the horror tropes, Robert Eggers‘ 2011 flick is all about the awful things we do to those we love and just how easy it is for a community to eat each other alive.
The family in The Witch are doomed the second the opening credits end. Banished from their own community for being too hardcore religious—which is saying something for Puritans—they set out to create their own settlement. Spoilers for those who haven’t seen the flick, but it doesn’t go well. Truthfully it was never going to go well.
Satan and a coven of witches didn’t hex the family to turn them into the worst versions of themselves. They simply brought to boil what was simmering the entire time. An overbearing patriarch, a jealousy-ridden matriarch, two terrible twins, an adolescent son, and Thomasin, a teenage girl who is bordering on womanhood and just wants a way out, aren’t mixing well. It’s all made worse by the fact they’re isolated in the middle of nothing.
When people who love each other are put in uniquely terrible situations, the human equation of “human being” emerges. And it’s not always pretty. Everything they do becomes a thing because we notice behavior we didn’t before. The way they chew their food, clear their throat, or even the sound of their voice can start to annoy. An unprecedented inciting incident, like getting your baby stolen or a pandemic, highlight the flaws of the people we love most. We’re already on edge, and all it takes is one little nudge to push us over the precipice.
The Witch builds on all those moments that show us who our loved ones really are. Thomasin’s dad, realizing that, ya know, food is essential, trades her mother’s prized silver for hunting supplies. The mother, already a wreck because of her missing baby, blames Thomasin. Rather than do what a dad would do, he does what a flawed human might do. He lets Thomasin take the fall long enough where the couple legitimately discusses giving their oldest daughter away to another family.
This isn’t to say moms and dads across the globe want to give their children away. However, it does reinforce the fact that self-preservation is our number one instinct. Humans are complicated and oh so flawed. So, when push comes to shove, we may press back and hurt those we care about in the process.
Those who know us the best not only get close enough to sell us out, they also know where every single pressure point is. What’s worse is those people know precisely how long to squeeze to inflict maximum pain. That saying about hurt people hurting people? Yeah, it’s basically that in a nutshell. Thomasin’s youngest sibs are monumental pains in the butt who pick on her fears and insecurities. The twins are a mess, even if no one else in the family can see it. Seriously, why wouldn’t they be? Besides all the obvious reasons the movie presents, they’re also pretty much ignored. Like most children who feel neglected, they act out for attention.
Not saying it’s cool to accuse your big sister of witchcraft and pretend to be comatose, but the motivation is easily understandable. When a family suffers one trauma after another, it’s usually the kids who bear the brunt. Whether it’s Satan and his witches or COVID-19, that’s a pretty big brunt to carry for narrow shoulders. Setting aside their motivation, how the twins treat Thomasin is another example of her family turning against her when she needs them the most.
Our transgressions towards our family and our community are like Jenga blocks. We may get away with pulling a few out of place, but eventually, the whole thing comes tumbling down. For Thomasin, that devastation hits its peak when her father not only accuses her of being a witch but blames her for everything gone wrong. Whether it’s the barren land, the dead children, or just the toxic relationship he has with his wife, it’s all on Thomasin. Ultimately, she’s the reason God is no longer taking their calls. When nothing is going right, family is often in the crosshairs.
For men like Thomasin’s dad, ones filled with pride and hubris, a scapegoat is always necessary. People throughout history often looked to someone else to hiss and boo at for the ills of society, an easy answer to complex problems. Humans were never genuinely great at the whole “love thy neighbor” thing, even if we tell ourselves the opposite. The Witch puts all of that history in the harshness of daylight and forces us to reckon with an uncomfortable truth: maybe we are only as good as the world allows us to be.
It’s easy to be good when everything is excellent, but that learning curve gets sharper when the brown stuff hits the fan. Treating our inner circle right is far from a given; it’s a choice we make every day. Thomasin’s family made the wrong choices at every single fork in the road, causing her to make the only decision she could. Religious doctrine—and the Paranormal Activity franchise—says evil preys on the ripest fruit. Those already open to suggestions due to more than a couple of hardships are easy pickings for the wicked.
But The Witch goes one step further and says bad situations just make bad people worse. And unless people address the root of the issues within their families or their communities, it’s not a question of if something awful will pop off but when.
For Thomasin, and for many people in the real world, family truly is an F-word.
There’s a lot of reading left to do in 2026, between the glut of summer releases and the approach of fall, when horror titles get a special push from publishers, but this has already been an incredible year for horror literature.
Some of the biggest names in the genre have turned in outstanding work, rising stars have made their mark, and we’re only halfway through the year.
To celebrate the midway point of 2026, with plenty of horror books still to come, we’re taking a look back at the best horror books we’ve read this year so far, listed alphabetically by author.
If you missed any of these books earlier in the year, consider this your reminder to catch up.
Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
A student running from a crime he may or may not have committed escapes to his father’s country home in Japan, only to find himself haunted by strange apparitions, while in the past, a young samurai tries to find salvation for her family and finds a door to the future instead. Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic begins with this dialogue between past and present, and then blossoms into so much more, a cross-time ghost story about old wounds and what it really takes to finally heal them. I got so happily lost in this one that I would have read at least 200 more pages.
Persona by Aoife Josie Clements
In this tale of shut-ins, sex workers, artists, and the horrors they both summon and recoil from, Aoife Josie Clements weaves something that feels less like a story to be experienced and more like a psychic wound to be endured, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Evocative in its prose and nightmarish in its imagery, Persona is a story of the masks we wear, and the understanding that not all of our masks are particularly pretty or even easy to breathe through. It’s a dense, literary, unnervingly vicious book, and while it’s already attracted an audience, it deserves a much bigger one.
Dead First by Johnny Compton
Johnny Compton’s latest novel opens with a throwing down of the gauntlet, a sequence that made me instantly think “How on Earth is he going to top this?” It’s a story that begins with a billionaire hiring a private investigator to determine why, despite trying in many brutal ways, he cannot die. That premise, and the scene which sets it all off, is so alluring and delightfully gruesome that you almost can’t believe it’s the way a book begins, and then Compton just keeps going, delivering a supernatural mystery that I could not put down.
Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
A woman grieving for the life she wanted visits a mysterious island renowned for the healing salt its residents harvest and sell, seeking renewal and relief. What she finds instead is a strange cult with a twisted history with surprising resonance in her own life, and a people who are more than willing to grant the relief she wants, for a price. Laced with beautiful prose and moments of profound realization alongside folk and even cosmic horror, this is vintage Sarah Gailey.
Partially Devoured by Daniel Kraus
If you love horror film history and analysis, Partially Devoured is an essential. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel Kraus, the book is a deep dive into his favorite movie of all time, George A. Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead, complete with exhaustive research into the making of the film and passages of deeply moving memoir woven in. If you’ve ever wanted to know what the eerie music that opens the film is called while also bursting into tears at how horror movies can save your life, this is a must-read.
Wretch by Eric LaRocca
Our reigning King of Extreme Horror, Eric LaRocca weaves books of uncommon beauty out of the most nightmarish parts of humanity, and Wretch is no exception. The story of a grieving man who longs for relief and searches for it amid a strange support group that might be a cult, Wretch is a brutal journey into the darkest part of us all, and explores what salvation we might find when we get to the rotten core of the world and peel back its layers. LaRocca’s on a tear of great work right now that few other genre writers can match.
Headlights by CJ Leede
A mystery, a serial killer horror show, a tribute to Stephen King‘s The Shining. All of these things describe CJ Leede’s Headlights, and yet they don’t begin to cover the full breadth of horror awaiting you in this novel. The story of a former FBI agent drawn back into the cold case that haunts him most, it’s a shocker brimming over with vivid moments that’ll live behind your eyes. CJ Leede has now published three novels, and they’re all bangers, so it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.
It Came From Neverland by Cynthia Pelayo
Cynthia Pelayo has been one of our finest genre writers for years now, but It Came From Neverland is my favorite thing she’s written, and it’s not even close. A dark take on Peter Pan from the perspective of an adult Wendy Darling living in World War I-era London, Pelayo’s book works as both a satisfying horror narrative and a rich exploration of what it really means to never grow up. The horror never loses its potency, but it’s the search for the meaning behind the Peter Pan phenomenon in our own lives, and what we can do about it, that sticks with me most.
Filth Eaters by Ito Romo
Ito Romo’s Filth Eaters is a slim volume, one you can read in just a couple of hours if you’ve got the inclination, but it has the feel of a generation-spanning epic. The story of a breed of vampires born in Central America, the European vampires who encounter them, and the offspring they eventually produced, it spans centuries and packs loads of juicy lore into its pages while never losing its grip on character and narrative drive. I would read hundreds more pages of this world, but I’ll settle for this uncommonly grand-scale novella for now.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay
A former pro gamer gets a job at a tech company to pilot a brain-dead human body across the country, and so Paul Tremblay’s sci-fi-horror juggernaut begins. Indebted to Philip K. Dick, the primal snarl of Harlan Ellison, and the quirky comedy of The Big Lebowski, and yet wholly original, this is a towering and ambitious novel by one of horror’s most respected voices. What starts as a high-concept tech thriller soon becomes a startling meditation on the value of stories, who gets to tell them, and what happens when we cede too much control to machines we don’t understand. It’s a stunner.
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