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Childbirth is a beautiful thing -- bringing life into the world, and all that -- but it's also scary as heck and pretty gross. Combine that with the dark arts, as Grady Hendrix does in "Witchcraft for Wayward Girls," and you've got the makings of a fantastic body horror novel.
Actually, it's so much more than that. Hendrix is a wizard at mixing together tropes of terror in thought-provoking ways -- with no small amount of humor thrown in -- that always exceed the sum of their parts.
2014's "Horrorst¶r," for instance, takes an Ikea clone called ORSK and a handful of employees who spend the night in the furniture superstore, inconveniently built on the site of a notorious prison, and spins it into a brutal haunting that has a lot to say about menial labor and what it does to workers.
In 2016's "My Best Friend's Exorcism," Hendrix combines 1980s satanic panic with friendships among teen girls, possession and the best ever casting-out-of-a-demon scene that includes...