The Witches of Eastwick or How I Learned to Hate John Updike

Movies tend to screw up books.  It happens so often you can say "oh, I saw the movie" to anyone recommending a book and they will automatically go into zombie-groan-eyeball-rolling despair.  However, I saw the movie version of The Witches of Eastwick years ago (it was released back in '87) and it grew into a thing of beauty compared to the tripe from which it sprang.  It still had some scenes that made me turn green and the casting made no sense - with the exception of Jack Nicholson - but the story was far less of a clusterfoque.  *I would like to clarify that this book and movie are in no way connected to the book and tv show The Witches of East End.*


In the book, we meet three witches living in a small town and screwing everybody.  No kidding, those are the two things you are told straight off and then repeatedly about these women.  It was the late 60s and that whole sexual freedom thing was rampant. One of them even boffed the other one's husband but nobody cared. We're also told one of the husbands was transformed into a table mat, another is hanging like dried flowers in a basement and the third turned to powder and is shelved in an urn.  Somehow the women are also involved with this Unitarian church, one of them is nailing the pastor and all of them became extremely powerful sorceresses upon moving to the town, though that's never really explained.  Makes me want to stay the hell out of Rhode Island, because who wants a third nipple? Wait, did I tell you all three women had an extra nipple? yeah, there's that.

Enter a scruffy sleazeball who sets up an unseen lab in a crumbling mansion and installs a teak wood spa room with a retractable roof where he can have orgies and share his greasy loins with women who are inexplicably drawn to him.  All three witches go from scorn to hot-tubbing in a blink.  At one point, one of the witches actually kisses his ass.  There's a visual.

To sum up, we've got some longstanding criterion for your average American witch:  the presence of a third nipple (aka a "witch's teat"), inversion of religious phrases to perform pagan rituals and blind devotion to a devil character to whom she shows allegiance by kissing his backside.  We've got what I'd call serious misogyny with a dash of "look how well I know witchy shit" e.g,  "I made it rain so I could walk my dog on the beach! Watch out for piles!"  What we don't have are characters that make you care about how they turn out, explanations for their sudden mastery of the craft and roles for any strong women who aren't just relying on smooching devil tupkes.  If you think Mad Men just wasn't tough enough on those crybaby girls who shouldn't be in an office anyway, this book might be for you.  For the rest of us, there are plenty of others that won't give you the urge to vacuum in high heels...for example, Alice Hoffman's The Probable Future, those East End chicks I mentioned, Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, or Erik Setiawan's Of Bees and Mist.