The Stitch Witches
Book Review · Gothic Historical Horror
A man is found dead with his tongue stitched shut in red yarn, and Promise Land would very much like to call it an illness.
Promise Land, Massachusetts, 1723. A hard winter, a village where everybody watches everybody else, and a murder that happens twice.
The Stitch Witches is a gothic historical mystery told in rotating first person. Orphelia Dudley is the red-haired daughter of a respected family. Settie is the woman that family enslaves. The elders want the deaths called an illness, the children are singing a rhyme about three witches, and the town is looking for someone to blame. It came out today, October 9, and I read it before it did.
What worked
Settie is the reason to read it. She can read and write because Mistress Charity taught her, and she has spent her whole life learning how to look harmless while she watches the room. Her chapters have a calm, careful edge the other narrators don’t have, and I trusted her more than anyone else in the book. The pillory scene says more about this town than any of the murders does. A poor woman is put on display for stealing to feed her child, and nobody watching thinks they’re being cruel.
Where it stumbles
The dialogue mixes thee, thou and ye so loosely that it pulled me out more than once, and the narrators explain their feelings out loud far too often. The middle repeats itself too, another meeting, another body, another retelling of the same rhyme. Fifty pages shorter in the middle and the ending would have hit harder.
Still, the premise is strong and the setting feels properly lived in, and the final stretch moves. I’m giving it a solid, honest three.
Read the full review of The Stitch Witches, with every rating and content warning, here: suvienur.com/reviews/the-stitch-witches.
Book Information
- Title
- The Stitch Witches
- Author
- Krissie K. Williams
- Publisher
- Quill & Crow Publishing House
- Published
- October 9, 2026
- Format
- eBook ARC / NetGalley
Overall Rating: 3/5 · Writing Style: 3/5 · Characters: 3/5 · World-Building: 4/5 · Spice Rating: 0/5
Recommended for readers who like gothic historical fiction with a political edge, anyone who read The Crucible and wanted to hear from the people left out of it, and readers who enjoy rotating narrators and a slow-burn village mystery. Less recommended if you want fast, tightly plotted horror, modern-sounding dialogue, or romance.
Bloodthorn · suvienur.com