Night Witch [Paperback]

Jack Priest (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 29, 2005

Alone in bed Carolina plays with her locket, a gift from her dad. She doesn't know he stole it from an evil woman in Trinidad. She hears a noise outside her window, looks up and sees red eyes staring in at her. Something horrible is outside. The Night Witch is a soucouyant, Southern Caribbean cousin to the vampire and werewolf. She is a never aging shape shifter born of a mixture of Voodoo and European folklore. She lives forever because she wears a locket that contains a magic potion. Her locket has been stolen and she wants it back.

Editorial Reviews

Review

NIGHT WITCH is a fast-moving page-turner I couldn’t put down. Jack Priest is truly the Dark Priest of Horror. -- Ken Douglas, underpaid writer of DESPERATION MOON

This book scared my panties off, but I couldn’t stop reading. Thank God it was a hot night! -- Captain Katie Osborne, sea-going erotica writer

From the Publisher

Once again, in his third horror story NIGHT WITCH, Jack Priest reaches deep into a culture most of us living in North America and Europe know little of, and brings forth a bad thing to stalk and terrorize innocents. In this story two children, through no fault of their own, run afoul of a soucouyant, the Southern Caribbean cousin of the vampire.

There are still those living today that fear the soucouyant. It’s said she lives in that abandoned house at the end of the road, that she comes out after the sun goes down, when the bats replace the birds on the trees. She sheds her skin, turns into a ball of fire as she flies into the dark, descending finally as a blood devouring animal, seeking out young prey. It’s also said that you can keep a soucouyant away from your door by dropping rice in front of it. She cannot enter without counting each and every grain and she’s too impatient to do that, so she moves on to seek a victim elsewhere.

But can you kill a soucouyant once she is on your trail? That’s the question young Carolina and her friend Arty have to find the answer to, because Carolina has something a soucouyant wants, but she doesn’t know it. She knows only that an evil old horror she calls the Night Witch is after her. And it appears that she and Arty are alone in their stand against it. However, unknown to her, her estranged father, who unwittingly set the beast on her, is doing his level best to draw the thing away.

Will he succeed? Can Carolina and Arty stay alive until he does? Or are the children going to have to deal with the Night Witch themselves.

NIGHT WITCH is a book full of tension and suspense, a horror thriller that we think will firmly plant young Jack Priest among the greats of the genre. And frankly, we think if you give it a try, you'll come back for more.

Sincerely,

Bootleg Press

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 340 pages
• Publisher: Bootleg Press (September 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974524662
• ISBN-13: 978-0974524665
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,424,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful waste of my money, March 1, 2005

By 

Compulsive Reader (Seattle WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Night Witch (Paperback)

I bought this book when I saw it rated highly on an Amazon list that contained quite a few other horror books that I had enjoyed reading. I could not even finish this book; I forced myself through the first 50 pages before I gave up. It was very poorly written, and full of bad cliches; in the first few pages one of the protagonists kills a bad guy by driving his nose into his brain using his fist. Come on, Jack. Not only is this incredibly overused, it's also not possible.

If your looking for a good gruesome read, look elsewhere. Avoid this book.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She will get you in the night!, July 28, 2006

By 

- Kasia S. (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Night Witch (Paperback)

Night Witch was a slick, cool and a really fast read, as I could have read hundred more pages. Jack Priest writes like he knows everything, as he is well accurate and prolific in his descriptions, nothing is staged and unbelievable and the story is as far out as it gets! This tale of fantasy married with horror is very enjoyable as we trek with John Coffee, an unusual character with a passion for stealing things large and small, who is smart, funny and someone you either want to be best friends with or just want to be him. He gets into a large fiery mess, stealing a locket that gets him in more trouble that he ever bargained for, as the thing he stole it form is beyond life and death and will stalk him until it either rests in its grave or kills him and gets it back. The characters in this book are both smart and fast, but they are human and they make mistakes, they are not perfect yet it makes them more real than most people I run into every day. I loved the character development and the conversations, I felt like the writer picked my brain and typed it all over his pages.

The story is split in two views, something I love in books. I get hooked on one and then the other and in the end I get to enjoy them coming together in a turbulent and mouth watering ending.

John is on the run from a mysterious creature that can appear as anything, but it chooses predatory and nasty forms of dangerous animals with the dead give away of its red eyes that sear though many in the book, sending chills and cries from its victims. I loved the fight sequences as there were many and the combat one on one with John and the creature was superb. I felt chills on my spine reading about a wolf in the dark forest in the fog, with it's claws ticking on the rocks, its snout dripping with hunger and I felt as if I was in the story and tried not to overstep the safety zone from which I was watching. The second story line deals with a pair of eleven year olds, Carolina and Arty, who were marvelously written, as it is rare that I enjoy youngsters in books, the only other author who really captured them well was Dan Simmons but for a new writer such as Jack, his children were breathtaking. They were kids, with their tender minds, and brave souls who became friends and fought obstacles greater then the sum of them put together and I loved reading their adventures and their dangerous escapes from the Night Witch. They had personal problems to deal with, gut wrenching child abuse and bullies at school, while trying to survive a killer that grown men fought and lost their lives to. I wouldn't dare to spoil the ending but it was great! I love when the climax is even greater then the story told, for all the buildup you read really brings you ultimate satisfaction and makes the whole experience of cracking open a book such a rewarding one.

I cant wait for more books from this author, as his is slick as a silver bullet in the night and he really doesn't miss with his stories.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Imperfect, but fun, December 6, 2008

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Night Witch (Paperback)

John Coffee is a thief who got more than he bargained for when he stole a magical locket from a soucouyant, the last of a breed of shape-shifting, werewolf-y, Caribbean witches who are next to impossible to kill. The Witch has been hunting Coffee ever since, looking to get her locket back but also doing her best to rip his throat out. Problem is, before he understood its significance, Coffee gave the locket to his daughter, eleven-year-old Carolina. He's been distancing himself from her since with a view to protecting her from the Witch, but now he's back on the scene and trying to warn her.

Jack Priest's Night Witch follows Coffee's battles with the Witch, high-octane fights that leave him injured and her shooting off skyward as a ball of flame. The Witch's mythology is related in the book, but we're never given her point of view. She remains an unknowable bogeyman, an Energizer bunny of a mythological demon, bent on destruction.

Because Coffee's part of the story is pretty much all action, it's less interesting than the other story Priest tells in the book, about the incipient relationship between Coffee's daughter and her classmate Arty, a persecuted kid who bravely faces the more mundane monsters in his life--school bullies and his abusive father. In the face of the danger posed by the Night Witch, as well as the bullies, Carolina and Arty's relationship develops more rapidly than it might have otherwise.

Night Witch isn't perfect: it's not clear why the guys in the boat are after Coffee at the beginning of the book; Priest's female characters seem unusually comfortable with stripping in front of men they don't know well; there is a paragraph-long political rant on page 163 that seems out of place; Arty's conflict with his father ends a little too conveniently; the mothers of both children are hands-off in their parenting to a degree that's hard to believe. But on the whole, it's a fun read, like watching an old Night Stalker episode with an appealing YA element thrown in. In fact, though it's not marketed as such, I might recommend the book to the YA crowd as well as adults, given that Arty and Carolina are such appealing characters and carry so much of the story.

-- Debra Hamel