Plot Summary
First Night, Final Screams
The sickening night Sara recalls—the one where the screams of neighbors across the hallway signal the moment civilization collapses—haunts every cell of her body. Huddling with family, Sara is introduced to survival not as an act, but a state of being: children sob, adults grasp for control, and monsters born of mold, pipes, and mud consume humans one by one. Films and memories spiral in Sara's mind, but the horror is real. The apartment block becomes tomb-like as the unseen attackers, later called "witches," hunt. A childhood ends, and a new, bruised identity emerges, forged by panic, helplessness, and the determined grip of siblings and frail mothers at the heart of a world that's instantly gone rotten.
Sheltering Through Fright
Sara, her sibling Danny, Ma, Lilian, and the children migrate from unsafe city blocks to a countryside cottage, burdened by the trauma of nights spent listening to inhuman shrieks and lurking dread. They set up basic defenses: homemade wards, careful lockings, and constant vigilance. Sara is cast by circumstance into a role between sibling and surrogate parent. Children are both comfort and liability. They sleep in bunches, craving warmth and light, while adults patrol the perimeter, nervous about every noise. The comfort of old routines—stories, CD music, and shadow theater—barely mutes the dark thump of fear. Everything is temporary. Even beds, even safe rooms, even hope.
Warding Off the Dark
In a desperate, beautiful countryside abandoned by its prior family, Sara and her kin piece together ancient protections: wards built from folk memory and Ma's knowledge—herbs, stones, salt, and the flowing village stream. The "witches" that prowl the world now follow rules dredged from superstition. The makeshift family invents a new curriculum—survival lessons, foraging, animal care—in an effort to give the children a sense of rhythm and self-worth. Meanwhile, the garden and the animals remind them of a gentler life, a sharp contrast to the horror outside. The children's play stands on an edge of collective trauma, spinning tales of unicorns and dragons and dark, creeping things.
Family Bonds, Fraying
Family dinners, shared chores, and fireside games become fraught as exhaustion gnaws at nerves. Danny and Lilian pull together in love, Ma drifts into maps and memories, and Sara feels a growing isolation, edged by her own longing for connection and belonging. Protecting children and establishing routine become acts of rebellion against despair. But every task—chopping potatoes, checking wards—reminds the survivors of how thin their barrier against horror truly is. Sara craves privacy, adulthood, and a new story for herself. Each day, the past seems more distant, and grief settles in as a quiet, ticking companion.
Orphans in the Wild
The family scavenges, repurposes, and teaches themselves to survive, with the older children pressed into adult roles far too soon. Sleep is shallow, meals sparse, and the knowledge that death is always close clings to every task. The discovery of a stray kitten briefly rekindles joy, but Sara knows even the smallest joy comes wrapped in anxiety and guilt. Their home is now a set of barriers—warded borders, scavenged pouches, and whispered warnings—against a world that is no longer their own. Even the youngest are versed in the difference between safety and doom.
Unwelcome Guest, Unanswered Questions
The urgent need to help battles deep paranoia when Parsley, a young woman, is discovered outside the wards, nearly dead. Bringing her inside—warded and watched—is both an act of mercy and a new risk. The group's debate over her fate exposes how trauma twists trust; she becomes both a symbol of hope and a suspected threat. Parsley's presence is a catalyst: Sara finds herself drawn to Parsley's strange, dreamy resilience, yet never shakes the worry that the witches might now have an agent within their walls.
Rituals and Arguments
Daylight means working the garden, gathering water, teaching, and rechecking the always-unstable wards. Nights are marred by screams and the thick, feral noises of the witches. Within the fragile walls, arguments and whispered alliances bloom; love, resentment, and sacrifice war for primacy. Fierce debates over safety, dreams, and the losses pile up—family members stake their needs against the group's survival. Parsley's outsider status only intensifies the pressure. Sara feels a forbidden hope and longing around her, but guilt and loyalty to family keep her torn and restless.
Out Into the Shadows
A broken ward and a new attack force departures. They must again become nomads—searching through haunted villages, empty houses, and fog-thick moors. The journey is dangerous, punctuated by half-perceived monsters and the rising sense that some horrors are human. Old stories of evil—witches, jinn, doomsday cults—are retold and reimagined to fill the gaps trauma leaves. Sara and Parsley's relationship deepens, measured through stolen moments and confessions, masked by the ever-present dread that emotional connection could be a fatal vulnerability.
The Girl at the Gate
When Noah is taken by the witches, the fragile unity shatters. The rescue mission's moral dilemmas mount: Danny and Ma leave Sara to guard the twins, while Parsley, driven by guilt and secrets, pushes Sara to run away from the doomed quest. Sara refuses, bound by blood and the memory of rescue. As she chooses loyalty over safety, she faces the creeping awareness that darkness lurks not just outside the wards, but in hearts desperate for survival and love. The knowledge that trust is negotiable, even expendable, marks a loss of innocence for all.
Harvest of Regret
Sara and Parsley set out to find Noah, crossing moors and woods haunted by memories, creatures, and the ghosts of ordinary things (signs, poppets, folk stories). Threats multiply—witches, violence visited upon other survivors, and the horror of being forced into complicity. Relationships are tested by fatigue, hunger, and the slow realization they are being herded by forces greater than themselves toward a fate they cannot avoid. Love—frail and urgent—grows between Sara and Parsley, but beneath it oozes suspicion, regret, and a hunch that their destinies are being orchestrated by the very beings they fear.
Longest Night, Deepest Fears
The search ends at an ancient manor, a labyrinth filled with enchanted traps, roots that bleed, voices mimicking the lost, and witches in every shadow. Here, Sara learns the depths of Parsley's involvement: Parsley was, knowingly or not, a lure for the witches—a traitor forged by the same desperation and loss that animates all survivors. Survival demands impossible sacrifices. Sara is confronted not only with lost family but also with the costs of love, shame, violence, and faith in a dying world.
Betrayal and Bargains
Trapped by both witches and her own emotional wounds, Sara must choose between damnation and a cruel mercy: to barter her own and her family's future for Noah's life. Parsley's betrayal is both monstrous and heartbreakingly human—a demonstration that love, even twisted, can coexist with sin. The witches extract their due with ancient rituals, promising protection in exchange for ongoing sacrifice. Sara's identity fractures, all childish dreams and daydreamed futures dissolving as she becomes the family's next unlikely savior, and perhaps its latest curse.
Into the Witch's House
The inside of the manor is a dreamlike maze—a place where the witches' true nature is revealed not as magical but as ancient, patient predators. Sara and Danny must navigate not only monsters, but manifestations of their own guilt and trauma: rooms filled with uncanny figures, hallways where beloved voices become lures, roots that feed on the living. All the hope gathered through their journey is spent as they push through, driven by the blunt need to rescue Noah and not be the last ones left.
The Labyrinth Within
With Noah's rescue comes the heaviest loss: Ma is seen fused into the witch's natural machinery, her last acts a mix of protection and surrender. Wounds both physical and emotional define the escape, as Sara and Danny drag Noah from the house but cannot bring themselves to finish grieving. The witches, whose aims remain as alien as they are instinctive, retreat, but the toll they've taken lingers. Sara's guilt over Ma and Parsley simmers, knotting with the knowledge that any safety from here forward is conditional, uneasy, and bought with blood.
The Cost of Reunion
Returning to the wilds with Noah, Sara is forced to weigh the worth of any victory. The child is alive, and the family is reunited, but at what cost? The lessons are bitter: love is insufficient to save everyone, and the need to protect is both sacred and corrupting. Sara's hands—bloodied from clawing Ma from her entanglement—are the final sign: there is no cleanliness, no innocence, in survival. Hard-won moments of comfort are shadowed by the knowledge that the witches' price is ongoing and that the family's survival means doom for others.
Blood and Bark
The witches are revealed not as magical villains but as a force of nature—a retribution for humanity's carelessness, ignorance, and arrogance. Folk wisdom now becomes necessity, as everything the survivors use to ward off evil is rooted in ancient knowledge—circles, stones, running water, iron, and story. Sara admits to herself that the family's survival depends on knowing when to use, break, or betray old customs—and when to make new ones. Her understanding shifts: she stands both as a child of trauma and as a maker of new legends.
The Only Way Home
With the immediate threat gone, the survivors must plan: return to the cottage, warn others, and teach the children what stories will save them, and which mistakes must not be repeated. Sara is both teacher and destroyer now, a guardian who understands too well the gravity of her choices. The witches' withdrawal is not an ending, but a pause, and Sara knows every kindness or hard lesson she imparts to Noah and the twins is stitched with her own past fears and failures.
Choosing Survival
Alone, Sara absorbs the full weight of what she's become: to save those she loves, she must help the witches find others. Trauma, numbed by necessity, mutates into a slow, rational horror: she is the new hunter, the new channel for superstition and fate. The story that began with family and home becomes one of bargains, betrayals, and complicity. Sara's despair is married to hope in a way that will define her forever—haunted caretaker, accidental bringer of new legends, living warning.
The New Hunter
Sara's new existence is shaped by memory, longing, and the inexorable grind of fate. She is not the first to make this bargain—Parsley was not the first, nor will Sara be the last. The curses and protections passed from mother to daughter, from one survivor to another, become the only inheritance left. She is both survivor and warning, a future echo whose pain tells others what bargains can and cannot be made.
Endings, Echoes, Beginnings
Sara fulfills her role as the instrument of survival and loss—lure, betrayer, tragic heroine. The cost of love, family, and self-preservation becomes both lesson and curse. Night still falls, mothers still warn children, and old stories take root in new ground. The book closes with the knowledge that safety is only ever temporary, bargains always have hidden costs, and the caretakers of the next generation will tell—or conceal—the story of what they did to ensure survival, even as the witches wait at the world's edge.
Analysis
"We Call Them Witches" is a contemporary folk horror that uses apocalypse as a lens to examine trauma, complicity, and the desperation for survival in a world that no longer recognizes ordinary decency. India-Rose Bower marries family drama with ecological allegory, creating a narrative where myth, memory, and nightmare collide. The book's core warning is that trauma, even when survived, creates ripples of moral injury that compromise future hope: to protect your own, you may be forced to sacrifice your compassion, your community, and even strangers. Bower's use of folklore is deeply modern—ritual, story, and love can be lifelines, but also traps. Crucially, the narrative never settles on easy answers: survival's cost is never annulled, and guilt is both justified and impossible to avoid. In our era of climate collapse and rising authoritarianism, "We Call Them Witches" suggests that new monsters will always rise, but so will new stories, and every act of hope or betrayal will echo in the next generation's fight. In the end, the story is a warning and an invocation—remember what you love, but count well the cost.
Characters
Sara
Sara, once an ordinary teenage girl, is thrust into a world of violent upheaval and monstrous predation. Forced by the apocalypse to act as both child and mother to her younger siblings, Sara's narrative is defined by her struggle to hold old affections, new longings, and desperate hope in balance against guilt and self-loathing. Ruthlessly adaptable, her journey from traumatized child to traumatized adult is marked by the hardening of her "soft" emotions: love, hope, grief. Her relationship with Parsley offers a fleeting return to innocence and connection, which is forever tainted when she discovers the betrayals necessary for survival. Sara's psychological arc, built on the tension between loyalty to family and the costs of survival, shapes the book's central tragedy: in saving her own, she must become complicit with the cycle of violence that destroyed the world.
Parsley
Parsley incarnates both survival and treachery—first welcomed as a helpless stranger, then revealed as an agent (witting or unwitting) of the witches' will. She is a study in contrasts: open, bright, and curious, yet burdened by despair and ancient compulsions. Her complicity, born of loss and bargaining, exposes a core truth of the post-apocalypse: everyone pays, and the price is always personal. Her love for Sara is genuine but cannot outweigh her craving for forgiveness, safety, and the ghosts of her lost family. She both teaches Sara how to use old ways against the witches and demonstrates how dread and love can coexist. Ultimately, Parsley is a vessel for the central moral—survival unmoored from principled love leads to monstrous bargains.
Danny
Sara's older sibling, Danny is resourceful, bossy, and quietly fragile. They anchor the family's practical routines and boundaries—warding, foraging, and discipline—with persistent anxiety and resentment for the burdens placed upon them. Danny's gender-nonconforming identity becomes a minor detail next to the all-consuming stress of leadership. Their partnership with Lilian is a rare pocket of warmth, but their style is more steel than comfort. The apocalypse brings out Danny's best and worst: control, quick calculation, and immense (sometimes too-tough) love. The narrative uses Danny to probe the emotional costs of responsibility, sibling rivalry, and the dangers of suppressing vulnerability during disaster.
Ma
Ma is the repository of folklore and practical magic—her ancestral knowledge offers the only genuine hope for defense. But she is also cold, remote, and driven by her inability to fully protect her children. By falling back on her own parents' traditions, Ma bridges the gap between old and new worlds. Her gradual fading from the family's emotional center—retreating into maps and wards—suggests the limits of both parental authority and "folk wisdom." Her fate, entwined with bark and roots, is a manifestation of the price for both knowledge and refusal to acquiesce to monstrous demands. She teaches Sara that love alone is not enough, and that some sacrifices must be made in silence.
Lilian
Lilian is a crucial emotional anchor—she is kind, maternal, and humble. Her background on a farm gives practical skills, and she intuitively supports the children and repairs the fragile group communications. Her relationship with Danny helps keep hope alive, but she is also tested by trauma, forced to re-examine the meaning of "family" in a lawless world. Lilian's role as a foster mother, teacher, and peace-maker preserves sanity, even as her own innocence is eroded by loss and fear. She embodies the ordinary courage required to raise children in a nightmare.
Noah
Noah, the older of the children, represents both vulnerability and the possibility of future resilience. Caught between childhood and a bad-adulthood, his kidnapping is a breaking point for the group. Though resourceful and quiet, Noah is emotionally wounded, forced into maturity too soon and left with scars. His rescue is not a full return to safety—he awakens in a world forever altered, his faith in family tested but unbroken.
Ava & Isla (The Twins)
The twins embody both hope and risk: their playfulness and naiveté mask deep wounds from a world that turned hostile before they could form stable memories. Their dependence binds the family together, but their presence also sharpens everyone's sense of danger. They are the emotional center for Sara and Lilian, but also reminders that even the innocent cannot escape the consequences of others' choices.
The Witches
The "witches" are not magical in the traditional sense, but rather inhuman forces of vengeance and wildness, ancient as the world and viciously amoral. Their shifting forms—snakes, tangled roots, twisted human parts—are both psychological mirrors and ecological warnings. They play by the rules encoded in myth, but they remain utterly alien. Their communication is primal—bartering, tempting, punishing—rather than "evil" in a moral sense. They reveal that not all threats can be understood, and some bargains, once made, remake both the world and the survivor.
The Commune
Parsley's parents and sister, destroyed or transformed by the witches, operate as absence and memory. Her desperation to salvage or resurrect them underlines the core human urge to bargain with fate, no matter the price. Their fate illustrates the novel's warning: love alone does not redeem, and history repeats itself in cycles of sacrifice and doomed hope—a lesson both ancestral and frighteningly fresh.
Survivors and Scavengers
Other fugitives—like Julian and Ameera—reflect possible futures and the limits of luck and folk-wisdom. Their brief appearances show the extreme variations in coping: from denial, superstition, or violence, to brittle hope and negotiated co-existence. Each embodies a fragment of human potential and defeat, offering mirrors for Sara's choices and the web of consequences spread by every act of kindness, fear, or selfishness.
Plot Devices
Nonlinear Memory, Present-Tense Trauma
Fragments of memory, filmic "wide shots," and jammed-up recollections allow Sara (and the reader) only partial, flickering access to the past and its lessons. We continually circle back to origin points—corridors, gardens, moments of domestic hope or horror—each recontextualized by new betrayals and losses. This provides both narrative propulsion and psychological realism: in surviving trauma, even one's own motives are opaque.
Old Folklore as Survival Science
The rituals, charms, and stories that once shaped festivals and bedtime tales become literal tools of life and death. Warding with salt or iron now truly matters. Each attempt to apply a piece of lost lore (rowan branches, adder stones, poppets) is simultaneously desperate, scientific, and superstitious. This allows the novel to interrogate why we keep myths alive, what makes them powerful, and how their purposes shift in extremis.
Nested Storytelling, Perspective Shifts
Quotes, retrospection, interrupted tales, and invented games structure the narrative. The constant blending of survivalist strategy with magical thinking—through song, memory, or children's games—disguises (or reveals) truths otherwise too raw to face directly. Testimonies, especially from Parsley, force Sara to recalibrate: even traitors are products (not just agents) of pain.
The Unreliable Bargain
Repeatedly, the device of bargaining—whether with the witches, with family, or with oneself—structures every major plot turn. Promises (Keep the children safe! Save Noah!) always lead to new dangers, and emotional bargains mask or provoke later betrayals (as in Sara's final fateful choices). The novel is haunted by the impossibility of a "clean" win, ensuring that every escape is partial and every protection is temporary or borrowed.
Monstrous Metaphor
Their inhuman nature functions as both literal predation and as metaphor for guilt, shame, regret, and the unknown forces that shape history—especially climate change, generational violence, and ancestral wisdom gone awry. Scenes of environmental horror (fungus, roots, rivers) support both physical and symbolic readings: the natural world as both victim and avenger.
