Burn Mark

Burn Mark author Laura Powell tells us about why she chose to write a contemporary spin on witches - and Booktrust's resident fan of 'witchy fiction', Anna Loudon, shares her thoughts on the book

Laura Powell:

The true history of witch-hunts and witch-trials has all the gory fascination of a horror film. No wonder witches in fiction have been done to death – often literally. But when I decided I wanted to write a crime thriller with a paranormal twist, I couldn’t resist casting witches as both heroes and villains.

With their abilities to see through walls, fly through the air and possess people’s minds, witches have many ways to outwit the law. This would also make them great gangsters. It struck me that a coven could easily be re-imagined as a Mafia-style organisation, and the Inquisition as a modern police force. So in the world of Burn Mark, witches are a small and persecuted underclass. Those who turn to crime are still hunted down and burned at the stake, by inquisitors who use jargon lifted from the War on Terror.

I knew I had to get away from over-familiar wands, cauldrons and magic spells. Instead, my witches work by channelling mental powers similar to ESP into other people, animals and objects. It’s a ritualistic yet messy process, using bits of rubbish and mud and bodily parts. I wanted to explore how such a primitive, mysterious force would survive in a high-tech society that’s fighting it on one hand, yet wants to exploit it on the other.

Witches have always been a mix of sexy and scary, victims and tyrants. That’s why they’re so exciting to write about. And where there’s a witch, there’s a way…

Anna Loudon:

 Being a big fan of the witchy in fiction, I was intrigued to read Laura Powell’s Burn Mark, a young adult novel just out from Bloomsbury.

Before reading, I wondered whether the book’s adoption of the historical persecution of witchcraft and its reliance on its traditional mythology and terminology – witch burnings, bells being sensitive to magic, banes and hexes, trial by drowning etc – was current enough to be interesting, given the currency of teen authors such as Silver RavenWolf’s manuals for teen witchery.

However, I was absorbed by the book’s dystopian near-future where the Inquisition is a government department and witches either submit to state regulation and are assimilated into society or act as criminals part of underworld gangs. Burn Mark skilfully mixes the mythology of traditional witchcraft with the gritty reality of an urban teen existence.

The book’s historical dimension references the classic anti-witch Inquistion text, the Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer, as well as highlighting the belief that Elizabeth I practised witchcraft. In this way, Powell draws a line through history for her main characters to their witch forebears, consolidating the issues of family, ancestry, the inheritance of powers and persecution that are so well thought through in the narrative.

The two protagonists, Lucas and Glory, represent two different experiences of being a witch, or having 'the fae', and come from opposing sides of a class divide and an ideological social battleground. Lucas, the son of an Inquisitor, is aghast to discover his abilities; Glory, the daughter of a family of celebrated East End Mafia-style witches, awaits the onset of her powers impatiently. However, both find they have to work together, resulting in some interesting questions about the society they find themselves in and the families they belong to.

I really enjoyed Burn Mark – even if witches aren’t your cup of tea, it’s a thought-provoking look at what happens when people are persecuted for things they have no control over, and a clever mix of past and present – all in a page-turning read!