The First and Last Days of Scottish Witchcraft

C.J. Cooke, The Book of Witching

A calamity has occurred on an uninhabited island in the Orkneys, in Scotland’s sparsely populated far north. Three teenagers reenacted a pre-Christian ceremony, with all the cocksure enthusiasm of teenagers; but it’s ended with one teen dead, another maimed, and the third missing. Now the adults around them must reconstruct what happened, because a malevolent force nobody’s yet seen may have something to profit from the catastrophe.

C.J. Cooke, a sometime university professor, has gained renown for her intensively researched, historically themed dark fantasy novels. This is no exception; not many horror novels include a works-cited page. For this volume, she delves into one of Scotland’s darker episodes. Even by witch trial standards, Scottish trials were notoriously brutal, a revolting mix of Christian piety and state-sanctioned torture which extracted confessions through truly appalling means.

In 2024, Clementine Woodbury struggles to understand the events that stranded her daughter in a Glasgow burns unit. Once lively and free-spirited, Clem’s daughter Erin has grown moody and secretive since becoming a teen mother. With Erin under sedation in a sterile room, Clem can’t ask direct questions about her mysterious injuries, so she takes her granddaughter and commences a freelance investigation. She isn’t prepared for the secrets she uncovers.

Parallel to Clem’s investigation, Alison Balfour stands accused of witchcraft in 1594 Kirkwall. Though the accusation carries whiffs of religious paranoia, Alison quickly realizes the truth: she’s a pawn in a powerful dynastic struggle for control of the Orkneys. Her confession, or lack thereof, will determine which rapacious aristocrat will control Orcadian government—though either outcome will be disastrous for ordinary smallholders like her family.

Cooke’s balance between these two narratives asks important questions. What debts do we moderns owe for injustices performed centuries ago? And what obligations do we bear to future generations? Alison Balfour realizes quickly that she can’t prevent her own unjust death; she can only determine what consequences her death brings upon others. Clem can’t pinpoint what caused her family’s sufferings, but clearly something dark lingers in her heritage.

C.J. Cooke

Though marketed as a “thriller,” this novel’s contemporary portion more resembles an amateur sleuth mystery. While the police struggle to fit Erin’s grievous injuries into their pre-written crime narrative, Clem assumes responsibility for uncovering what happened to her daughter. If this means scrambling into Scotland’s enigmatic, impoverished north to confront a secretive cabal, she clearly considers this an acceptable price for a truth she might not like.

The historical portion, meanwhile, is explicitly political. Orkney suffers under a government that rules by stoking fear among the population, retaining power by convincing the population of an even worse enemy. Alison knows she can’t win this battle. Therefore she’s forced to redefine victory according to what keeps her family and her people alive. Cooke reconstructs a poorly documented time of paranoia, recorded only through state and religious propaganda.

Therein, Cooke tacitly acknowledges something often forgotten in histories of witch hunts: they weren’t the flexings of invincible empires, eager to demonstrate their power. Witch hunts happened after the church-state hybrid began losing unquestioned authority. Alison Balfour’s execution happened a generation after the Scottish Reformation, as the Stuart monarchy clung to dwindling authority. Witch hunts are the superannuated flailings of a broken empire already in retreat.

In this, Cooke shows an aristocracy terrified of its people. Patrick Stewart, Second (and last) Earl of Orkney, sought the church’s benediction because he knew the people already organized against him, that the trade guilds that built his palaces were also hotbeds of insurrectionist intrigue. The Earl and his retinue yearn for unquestioned power, but the very fact they must resort to such extremes proves they’ve already lost the people’s devotion.

Alison Balfour works as a peasant healer among people who survive in nature’s bounty; but palace intrigues and state paranoia drag her into early modernism. Clem Woodbury trusts medicine, modernism, and police technocracy; but she’s forced to delve into her lost heritage and forgotten bloodline when modernity can’t answer her questions. Both women discover truth hiding in secretive corners, that nothing’s ever as simple as the official narrative would claim.

Cooke creates a story of nuance and complexity that rewards multiple levels of reading. She uses the markers of paperback thrillers, and on that level, one could read this book casually, like any other beach novel. But Cooke also asks questions about heritage, responsibility, and power, which don’t yield themselves to easy answers. Especially in Europe, where aristocratic paranoia still casts a long shadow, is the past ever really gone?