Book Review: The Lighthouse Witches

Synopsis:

High upon the cliffs of a remote Scottish island, Lon Haven, sits a lighthouse that has weathered storms for centuries.

Liv Stay has fled to the island with her three daughters – Sapphire, fifteen; Luna, nine; and seven-year-old Clover. A single mother, she’s been commissioned to paint a mural in the hundred-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island. It’s an opportunity to start over with her daughters . . . and escape truths she’d rather not face.

Lon Haven was meant to be a safe harbor. But soon strange things start to happen. They hear haunting noises in the dead of night, find animal skeletons left on Liv’s doorstep. Strangest of all, unknown children are discovered at the lighthouse . . . and then disappear without a trace.

When two of her daughters go missing, she’s frantic. She learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings — supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. The dangerous wildlings must be killed.

Liv doesn’t know what to believe

But within months, Luna will be the only member of the family left.

Twenty-two years later, Luna is still haunted by questions about what took place on the island. What happened to her sisters? What happened to her mother? She has never stopped searching for them. When she receives a call about her youngest sister, Clover — the one she remembers — she’s initially ecstatic. But Luna comes face-to-face with a seven-year-old. The girl is the same age Clover was when she vanished all those years ago.

Luna worries that Clover is a wildling. And though she has few memories of her time on the island, she’ll have to return to the one place she swore she would never revisit in order to find the truth about what happened to her family.

She doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.

Review:

Author C.J. Cooke (also known as Carolyn Jess-Cooke) grew up in Ireland and began writing at the tender age of seven on her grandparents’ old typewriter. She went on to earn a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Belfast, and enjoyed a career in academia, lecturing on Film Studies at the University of Sunderland. Before launching her career as a novelist, she published four academic works on Shakespearean films and movie sequels. Since publishing her debut novel, The Guardian Angel’s Journal, in 2011, she has won numerous awards. She now serves as a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, and researches how creative writing can help with trauma and mental health. She serves as the founder and director of the Stay-at-Home! Literary Festival, which is dedicated to providing people with accessible, inclusive, and eco-friendly ways to access literature. Her work remains focused on trauma, motherhood, loss, and social justice. Herself a mother to four children, she resides in Glasgow, Scotland.

The Lighthouse Witches is a blend of several genres: Gothic, paranormal, and mystery. At the outset, Cooke expertly sets the eerie, evocative scene: a decommissioned lighthouse called the Longing on the Scottish island of Lon Haven. It is “a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. . . . [L]ovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose.” It stands one hundred and forty-nine feet tall and offers breathtaking views from the lantern room accessed by climbing one hundred and thirty-eight steps. In a first-person narrative, Liv describes arriving on Lon Haven in 1998 and seeing it for the first time with a sense of haunting familiarity, even though she has never been there before. She has come to the island with her children in tow looking for a fresh start, on the run from an unpleasant truth she is too frightened to face head-on. She is well aware of “how stupid” her thought process is, but is unable to disavow herself of the ludicrous notion that if she just ignores the problem it will go away. They are to live in the rustic lighthouse keeper’s cottage while Liv paints a mural inside the lighthouse that has been commissioned by the owner, Patrick Roberts. He wants the mural to be “stunning and inspiring” and plans to turn the lighthouse into a writing studio.

Sapphire immediately finds a grimoire — an old book of spells — on the cottage’s bookshelf. Cooke inserts excerpts of “The Grimoire of Patrick Roberts,” which details the life of a local family who “lived our lives by magic” in 1662 and what ultimately happened to them. Liv and her children learn there were witch hunts not just in the United States, but also in Scotland and England. In fact, women believed to be witches were imprisoned in a dungeon underneath the lighthouse before being burned if they were found guilty of witchcraft. One of those witches cursed the island as she was dying, and a young child went missing there thirty years earlier. According to the boy’s sister, another child was found a year later who looked just like him, but bearing a telltale mark on his neck. Was he a wildling, sent to kill every member of his family until their bloodline was destroyed?

Life continues outrageously in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity, the past always in the present.

Sapphire’s first-person narrative expresses her dismay at being dragged from her school, friends, and boyfriend in New York to live in the “arse-end of nowhere.” She misses her stepfather, Sean, who died in a car accident, and daydreams about her biological father materializing. Liv and Sapphire have an unsurprisingly fraught relationship — at fifteen, the always headstrong girl has grown disrespectful and defiant. But Liv loves all her girls boundlessly and struggles to balance raising them as a single mother with accepting commissions for paintings and teaching art.

Yet another narrative is set in 2021 and focuses on Luna, who has only fragmented memories of the time she spent on Lon Haven. Her psychiatrist has explained that whatever happened to her all those years ago was so horrific that she dissociated, “effectively checking out of the horror,” her memories deeply buried in her mind. Liv abandoned her when she was just nine years old. “No explanation. No apparent motivation. Just dumped her in the woods and vanished into thin air.” Now she and her boyfriend, Ethan, are expecting their first child. She has vowed never to return to Lon Haven, but maintains Facebook pages devoted to her missing sisters, Sapphire and Clover, neither of whom have ever been accounted for since they went missing more than two decades ago.

But then Luna receives a life-changing call. Clover has been found! Since she was seven when she disappeared, she is twenty-nine years old now. But when Luna rushes to the hospital to meet the “wee girl” who has been found, she is disappointed. It’s not Clover at all. It’s a seven-year-old girl. But the girl bears an uncanny resemblance to Clover and asks why Sapphire is carrying the stuffed giraffe Clover adored. Sapphire kept it in the intervening years. The girl has knowledge of other matters, as well, that only Clover could possess.

Cooke weaves a tale of increasing angst in 1998. The creepy lighthouse has been vandalized with horrific symbols, but as Liv prepares to bring the mural to life, she makes other unsettling discoveries. She meets Patrick Roberts, the “island’s mystery millionaire,” who turns out to be much younger and more eccentric than anticipated. And disturbing details come to light about how he came to own the lighthouse.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Luna struggles with the prospect of marrying Ethan and takes custody of Clover, who insists that she just left the cottage on Lon Haven the night before she was found. She was discovered wandering on the side of the road, claiming that she’d gone looking for Luna. And she has an inexplicable mark on her hip.

Cooke deftly alternates the narratives into a cohesive tale of witchcraft, curses, time travel, and legends that mystify and frighten her characters and mesmerize readers. Liv is an empathetic character — a single mother doing her best to care for her children and earn a living after experiencing trauma. She is frightened and in denial about what the future might hold for her and her daughters. Sapphire is a typically inquisitive, willful teenager trying to assert her independence, while Luna is a young woman who survived early traumatization but has found a man who loves her and is attempting to lead as normal a life as possible when it is upended by the reappearance of Clover. But it can’t really be Clover. So Luna has to return to Lon Haven to face her own demons and determine who Clover really is.

As the narratives meld cohesively, Cooke gradually reveals the details of her uniquely inventive plot as she gradually accelerates the story’s pace and ramps up the dramatic tension. She assembles a world in which wildlings (also known as fae or fairies), witches, and magic exist, and reveals the true motives of Patrick Roberts. She also explains precisely what happened to Liv and Sapphire, as well as Clover’s true identity, and provides a conclusion that is surprisingly emotional yet fitting and, ultimately, uplifting and hopeful. In the process, she relates a tale that is engrossing and entertaining. With her richly descriptive prose and thoughtful examination of parent-child relationships, lost love, and the power of fear, she might make believers even of readers for whom the genre is outside their comfort zone.

Excerpt from The Lighthouse Witches

LIV, 1998

Lon Haven
The Black Isle, Scotland

The lighthouse was called the Longing. Pitched amidst tessellations of rock black as coal, thrashed for over a hundred years by disconsolate squalls, it needled upward, spine-straight, a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. It was lovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose. I always thought lighthouses were beautiful symbols, but this one was more than that-it was hauntingly familiar.

Night was drawing in and we hadn’t yet met the owner. We’d driven hundreds of miles over mountains, through sleepy villages and winding roads, usually behind herds of cattle. We had taken a ferry, and got lost four times, on account of using an outdated, coffee-stained A-Z road map with several pages missing.

I parked up behind an old Range Rover. “We’re here,” I told the girls, who had fallen asleep against one another in the back. I wrapped my raincoat around Clover-she was wearing only a swimsuit over a pair of jeans-and lifted her up to walk a little way along the rocky beach daubed with spiky patches of marram and tough white flowers.

The four of us scanned the bay. It was a raw scene: a full moon hiding behind purple cloud, ocean thrashing against black cliffs. Gulls wheeling and shrieking above us. Trees stood like pitchforks, flayed by the wind. They hemmed the island, watching.

The lighthouse keeper’s bothy was a squat stone dwelling built close to the lighthouse. Smoke plumed from the chimney, pressing the earthy smell of peat into our noses. A woman stepped out to greet us. “Olivia?” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “Sorry I’m earlier than expected . . .”

“No trouble at all. Come on in out of the cold.”

We found ourselves in a cramped hallway, where someone had pinned a shark’s jawbone to the inner wall. Luna reached out to touch one of the teeth and I tugged her back.

Saffy nodded at it. “Is that from a great white?”

“Porbeagle shark,” the woman-Isla-said with a tilt of her chin. “We don’t get great whites. Porbeagles are just as big, mind, and every bit as dangerous.”

“I don’t like sharks, Mummy,” Clover whispered.

“We have a basking shark that tends to hang around the bay,” Isla said. She glanced down at Luna, who threw me a panicked look. “You’ll be fine with a basking shark. No teeth, you see. Basil, he’s called.”

“Is this where we’ll be staying?” Saffy asked warily, eyeing the shark jaw.

“It is indeed,” Isla said. She turned to the girls. “I’m Isla Kissick, and it’s absolutely thrilling to meet all of you. But I’m afraid I only know your mummy’s name. Why don’t you tell me your names?”

“I’m Luna,” Luna said. “I’m nine.”

“Luna,” Isla said. “What a lovely name.”

“It means ‘moon,'” Luna said, a little shy.

“Mine’s Clover,” Clover said, elbowing Luna out of the way. “I’m seven and a half and my name means clover, like the plant.”

“Also a lovely name,” Isla said. “And I bet you already know that clovers are meant to bring good luck?”

Clover nodded. “Mm-hmm. But my mummy said you make your own luck.”

“Very wise,” Isla said, glancing at me approvingly. She turned to Saffy, who flushed red.

“And who might this lovely one be?” Isla said.

“Sapphire,” Saffy mumbled to the floor. “I’m fifteen.”

“Well now, that’s lovely,” Isla said. “My daughter, Rowan, is fifteen. I’m sure you’ll meet soon enough. Now, come and sit down. I’ve made you all some supper.”

I nodded at the girls to leave their bin bags in the hall before following Isla to a kitchen at the back, where the smell of freshly baked bread and tomato soup made my mouth water.

I’d supposed that Isla was Mr. Roberts’ partner, but she turned out to be his housekeeper. She was short and lithe with long copper hair neatly pinned up, and her quick, round eyes searched all of us up and down. She had a beautiful Scottish brogue and spoke fast, as though the words were too hot to hold in her mouth for long. She was smartly turned out-a crisp white shirt, gray check trousers, polished ankle boots. The bothy was incongruously old-fashioned. I would learn that Lon Haven, its inhabitants included, was full of skewed time spheres. The absence of modern retail chains and its breathtakingly rugged landscapes made the place feel like you’d stepped back in time, perhaps to the very beginnings of the earth. The lighthouse itself was built upon an ancient Scottish broch that was built upon a Neolithic fort, which in turn was built upon late Jurassic rock, like an architectural babushka doll.

III

“There you go,” Isla said, placing bowls of steaming hot soup before each of us. I apologized again for the mix-up about our arrival. I’d planned to begin the commission a few weeks from now but decided to head north on the spur of the moment. Or the middle of the night, to be exact. We’d driven the whole way from York to Cromarty, only to find that the ferry was canceled for the day on account of high winds. The girls and I had to endure a very cold and uncomfortable night at a rest stop, sleeping in the car.

“It’s no trouble,” Isla said. “Mr. Roberts is away, of course, but I’m to take care of everything until he returns.”

“Are we sleeping in the car again?” Clover said, wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve.

“In the car?” Isla repeated, looking to me for explanation.

“I’m sure there are plenty of beds for all of us,” I said quickly, and this time I was the one to look to Isla for confirmation. I didn’t want to mention that we’d had to sleep rough.

“Of course there are,” she said. “Shall I give you the grand tour?”

The bothy was small but efficiently organized. A door at the rear of the kitchen led to a scullery with a washing machine and loo. Three bedrooms provided ample sleeping space with freshly made-up beds, and there was a bathroom with a shower cubicle.

We followed Isla to the living room at the front of the house, overlooking the garden.

“Now, you’ll have noticed it’s a bit chilly on the island. So you’re not to worry if you need to turn the heater on.” She nodded at the wood-burning stove. “You’ll find a shed at the side of the bothy stocked with wood. And I’ve put plenty of blankets in the cupboards for you to get cozy in the evenings. Which reminds me. Sometimes the electricity goes off. Nothing to worry about. You know how to manage an oil lantern?”

I followed her gaze to an old-fashioned oil lamp in the windowsill, which I’d assumed was for decoration. I caught Isla rolling her eyes as it became clear that no, I didn’t know how to manage an oil lantern.

“I’ll be sure to leave instructions,” she said with a tight smile.

“Does Mr. Roberts live here?” Saffy asked.

“This is one of his properties,” Isla said. “But no, he doesn’t live here. His main residence is north of here, twenty minutes or so by car.”

“Will you tell him I’ve arrived?” I asked.

“Well, I’d love to,” Isla said brusquely, “but he’s at sea just now.”

“At sea?”

“Aye, for all he has a half dozen houses dotted about the place, he prefers to be out on his boat.”

“I have a boat,” Clover offered.

Isla lifted an eyebrow. “Do ye, now?”

“It’s green with a purple chimney and I play with it in the bath.”

“Well, Mr. Roberts’ boat is a wee bit bigger than that, I’d wager,” Isla said, chuckling. “He tends to sail to Shetland at this time of year.”

“He’s a pirate, then?” Clover said, astonished.

Isla bent down to Clover’s eye level. “No. But I reckon he’d be a good ‘un.”

“Do you come from Shetland?” Clover asked, running her fingertips along the stubbly wood-chip wallpaper. Wood chip was her favorite texture.

“No,” Isla said. “I come from Lon Haven. Where d’you come from?”

“My mummy’s vagina,” Clover said.

I watched Isla’s face drop. “Girls, go have a look at your bedrooms,” I said, ushering Clover quickly away. “Do you know when I’m to discuss the commission with Mr. Roberts?”

“He said to give you this.” Isla reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out a piece of folded paper. I opened it up to find an elaborate and highly abstract sketch, a diagram of sorts. Lots of lines and arrows and circles, like a zodiac.

“What is it?” I said, turning the page to the side. There was no indication which way the sketch was meant to be viewed.

“It’s the mural,” Isla said flatly. “The thing you’re painting inside the Longing.”

I stared at her, wondering if I’d misheard. “This? This is the mural?”

She cocked her head. “Is something the matter?”

“No, no . . .” I said, though I didn’t sound convincing, not even to my own ears. “I suppose I thought there might be more to it than this. Written instructions, perhaps.”

“That’s all Mr. Roberts has given me. He said I’m to fetch whatever equipment you need to do the job. So perhaps you can write me a list of whatever you require and I’ll get onto it in the morning.”

Still dumbfounded by the sketch, I said I would, but that I’d need to see inside the Longing first.

“Ah, now that would be an idea,” she said, straightening a lampshade. “How about I show you just now?”

Outside, harsh winds buffeted us on the rocks, and I saw movement on the far reaches of the island. Seals, Isla told us. I was astonished at how close they were to the bothy, but she told me they were shy creatures, despite their size. They’d not bother us. I watched them slip off the stones into the black water, their shape in the dark almost human.

The lighthouse stood twenty feet away from the bothy toward the far end of the island. We all pushed against the wind toward the heavy metal door at the base. I could make out an object wrapped around the handle. A tree branch. I made to pull it off, thinking it had been blown on there by the wind and become stuck. Isla stopped me.

“Rowan wood,” she said. “It’s for protection.”

I had no idea what she meant, but I stepped back as she tried to leverage the door open. Finally, it shifted. I lifted Clover onto my hip and held Luna’s hand tight as we followed Isla inside.

“Bloody hell,” Saffy said, looking around. “This place is rank.”

I shushed her, but couldn’t help agreeing internally.

I’d never been inside a lighthouse before. I’d expected floor levels, an enclosed staircase. The Longing, however, was a grim, granite cone. A rickety staircase was pinned loosely against the wall, spiraling Hitchcock-style to the lantern room at the very top. The place reeked of damp and rotting fish. I wondered why we were standing in an inch of black liquid, until Isla explained that one of the lower windows was broken, and over time seawater had poured inside and pooled on the floor.

“I gather you’ll need something to pump it out before you start,” she said.

“Mr. Roberts is turning it into a writing studio, is that right?” I asked, and Isla nodded.

“He’s not published,” she added. “Just a hobby. I wouldn’t be expecting him to produce The Iliad or anything like that. He bought it last year and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Next thing I know, he’s asking me about getting a painter in to prettify it, make it into a writing studio.” She gave a shrill laugh. “Whoever heard of such a thing? Surely all you need to write is a pen and paper.”

“Maybe the views will inspire him,” I offered.

“Aye. Inspire him to go off sailing, more like.”

We were shrouded in darkness. Clover was clutching on to her toy giraffe, whimpering to go home. Bats flitted overhead. Moonlight trickled in from the small upper windows, revealing the height of the place.

“It’s a hundred and forty-nine feet tall,” Isla said, swinging her torchlight to the very top. “A hundred and thirty-eight steps to the lantern room. Braw views up there. I can show you when it’s light.” Her torchlight rested on patches of paint that had crumbled off, revealing raw stone. About halfway up someone had graffitied a section of the wall in garish shades of lime green and black.

“There was a break-in,” Isla said darkly. “Outsiders, you see. We get them here a lot more now, since the rental properties on the east side opened up. And the Neolithic museum, that’s new. You should take your girls.”

Isla reassured us that break-ins like this were rare, that tourists-or “outsiders”-didn’t frequent the place often. Lon Haven’s population was predominantly grassroots, with sixty or so archaeologists from “the University” working at the Neolithic sites. Some of the younger population had inherited crofts that they didn’t want to live in, so they’d started renting them out. The older population objected strongly both to the younger islanders moving away (“All of them want to live in Edinburgh or London,” Isla recalled with a sneer) and, as a result, drawing “outsiders” to the island to rent out the crofts.

Break-in aside, I was intrigued by the Longing. As an artist, two of my favorite things were shadows and curved angles, and this place had both in spades. The shadows seemed alive, like the wings of a giant bird stirred by our presence. It was creepy, yes, but also elegant-I loved how the staircase whirled upward in increasingly narrower circles within the cylinder of the structure, how the lack of right angles gave every small edge extra significance, how the architecture drew my gaze upward.

“Has the lighthouse ever been submerged?” I asked. I could hear wind pummeling the stone walls, the loud suck and slap of the waves close by.

“We get our fair share of storms,” Isla said, and I could tell she was choosing her words carefully so as not to put me off. “But the Longing has been standing for a hundred years amidst all that Mother Nature and the sea gods have to throw at her, and I daresay she’ll stand a hundred more.” A pause. “So long as you keep rowan on the door, you’ll be fine.”

It was as she said this that I felt a wave of deja vu pass over me. Saffy, Luna, and Isla were beginning to head toward the door to leave, but the feeling of familiarity was so strong that I paused, as though someone had spoken and I was trying to understand what they’d said.