Author: Corvina Sweeney
“At least if anyone accuses us of being witches, we can tell them we’re more about sparkles and penis statues than dark magic.”
Review
The Coven by Corvina Sweeney was the perfectly zany horror comedy I needed a great palate cleanser and an entertaining romp filled with small-town gossip and larger-than-life characters spinning in a tornado of chaos. Moving into the abandoned Pritchard place in the sleepy town of Albany, Louisiana, three newcomer witches instantly trigger the prying eyes, knowing nods, and unspoken whispers of the locals. Sweeney uses that mundane, unsettling calm as a brilliant setup: the author orchestrates the tension like a deranged puppet master until the gloves come off, the chaos boils over, and the story goes completely, gloriously off the rails.
The book is truly a tale of two stories. The first third is a restrained, slow-burn contemporary horror setting the board; the final two-thirds is a frantic, over-the-top, laugh-out-loud dark comedy where a botched spell unleashes a flesh-hungry zombie, an unruly demon, and an angry mob sharpening pitchforks. While the front half took me a day and a half of careful note-taking, I tore through the rest in a matter of hours, frantically flipping pages out of pure joy and bewilderment. Backed by snappy dialogue, an endearing cast of quirky witches, and a standout favorite in Kevin. He’s a walking cliché who had me laughing every time he sauntered or shambled into a room. This is a wildly fun, unhinged horror comedy that earns a prime spot on the shelf.
Curator’s Notes
The Pressure Cooker of Albany, Louisiana: Rather than faceless background extras, Sweeney builds a claustrophobic, gossipy Southern small town where every resident has a distinct identity—like Doreen Phelps, the church organist and self-appointed local authority on exactly who is headed straight to Hell.
The Pacing Whiplash: The structural transition from an atmospheric, outsider-perspective mystery into an unapologetic, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day supernatural free-for-all turns small-town paranoia into sheer, laugh-out-loud lunacy.
The Show-Stealing Shambler: Amid the chaos of unruly demons and pitchfork mobs, Kevin completely steals the spotlight as an absurd, shambling highlight who brings pure levity to every single scene he enters.
The Verdict: A deadpan, blood-and-giggles crowd-pleaser that proves sometimes the most entertaining cure for a reading slump is watching an unsuspecting town get swept up in a hurricane of supernatural disaster.