witchcraft, tarot, and powerful women with bad reputations, and she currently resides in Houston with her family, surrounded by antiques and dog hair. When not at her laptop spinning darkly hypnotic tales, she writes for her blog on child loss, hunts for vintage treasures, and reads the darkest books she can find. She is the author of YA novels Resurrection Girls and The Salt in Our Blood, and paranormal women's fiction The Witches of Bone Hill.
Morgyn applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Bane Witch, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Ava Morgyn's website.Her eyes slide to my booted foot. “You’re in trouble,” she says plainly. She looks concerned but not surprised.The Page 69 Test gives readers a solid grasp of what The Bane Witch is about and its primary characters, Piers and Myrtle Corbin. On this page, readers see Piers and Myrtle interacting for the first time, as Piers finally allows herself to relax a little bit after her escape from her abusive husband, Henry. Just prior to the portion I quoted, Piers recalls an example of Henry’s toxic and controlling behavior, which gives readers a condensed glimpse into her tortuous marriage and past, making the following dialogue, quoted above, more chilling and understandable. In this scene, there is a sense of Piers’ desperation and all she’s risked to flee her home and marriage, which is important to understand as the groundwork is laid for who she really is as the main character—a bane witch—and everything that implies. Likewise, there is a sense of her great aunt Myrtle’s maternal instinct toward her, as she prepares Piers a sandwich earlier on the page, and her inherent wisdom as she cautiously notes and asks about the circumstances of Piers’ sudden and unexpected arrival.
“Not anymore,” I tell her. Henry will never find me up here, miles from the comforts of urban living. I felt unsure until I arrived, but being tucked into the forest like a chick beneath the wing of a hen, so much unadulterated nature pooling for miles and miles—I can’t imagine it. And by now he’s found my note, knows I’m dead. Even without a body—it could have easily washed into the Atlantic—he won’t know to look at all if I did my job right. I permit myself a modicum of relief.
Myrtle leans back into a leather armchair, watching me eat. Beside her, a stack of old books glow arsenic green. “It’s been a long time, Piers,” she says quietly. “Why now?”
“I don’t go by that anymore.” My eyes meet hers. I’m not ready to talk about Henry yet, about why I came, how I got here.
While I wouldn’t say this singular page sums up the entirety of the novel, it does capture many of the complexities of this story—Henry’s abuse, Piers’ motivation and survival instincts, Myrtle’s role as Piers’ mentor. And while readers don’t meet Henry face to face on this particular page, they do get a disturbing introduction to who he is as a husband and a man, and the role he will go on to play in Piers’ story.
I do hope readers will find this peek into The Bane Witch tantalizing enough to consider reading well beyond page 69. It is a darkly fantastical tale that touches on the deeper, much more real issues of violence against women.
--Marshal Zeringue