In R.L. Stine’s The Mind Reader (1994) and Sinclair Smith’s Second Sight (1996), the young female protagonists have inexplicable visions, encounter doubt from those around them, and find themselves filled with frustration and uncertainty, as they try to balance what others think about them with what they know to be right. In Christopher Pike’s Witch (1990), Julia Florence sees visions as well, this time through a hereditary magical ability passed down through her mother’s side of the family. But when Julia sees visions of horrors to come, instead of self-doubt and uncertainty, she taps into rage and vengeance as she tries to change the course of fate.
Both Julia and her mother have magical powers, a legacy Julia carries on her own following her mother’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage after she used her powers to unsuccessfully try to heal a young woman. Julia’s mother raised her to embrace her power, though she is clear about its limitations, telling Julia “We’re not gods … we’re helpers. That’s all,” instructing her daughter to “Serve in what way you can, without attracting attention to yourself. Never flaunt your abilities. Never think you hold the power of life and death. Only God has that power. When it’s a person’s time, nothing can save them” (6, emphasis original). One of Julia’s powers is being able to “see” and divine by looking into the watery surface of a pond in the woods near their house, which her mother called “viewing” (9). As Julia looks at the surface of the water, she can check in on those she loves and see visions of things to come. Julia’s mother gave her two rules for her magical viewing ability: “she wasn’t allowed to spy on other people, and she couldn’t look in the pond when the moonlight was shining on it” (9). One night before going out with her friends, Julia falls asleep next to the pond and when she wakes up, she sees a vision in the moonlit water, of a liquor store holdup where a boy she’s never seen before is shot and killed by the robber. She’s disturbed by this vision but tries to shake it off and goes to meet her friends at their high school football game—where she discovers that the boy from her dark vision is her best friend Amy’s new boyfriend, a football player named Jim.
Julia and Jim feel an instant connection, and while Julia’s vision might provide some explanation for her instant recognition of a boy she’s never met before, Jim’s similar gravitation toward Julia seems to suggest something more. Their first meeting has an odd energy. “Jim and Julia looked at each other. Of course, there was a fence between them and they couldn’t shake hands, so Amy supposed they had to look at each other real long to make up for the barrier. But Amy began to feel just a little bit uncomfortable when the look stretched past five seconds and neither of them had taken a breath” (34, emphasis original). Amy is a remarkably good sport, especially since this isn’t the first time something like this has happened: Amy’s boyfriends have a bad habit of falling in love with Julia and asking her out before they’ve gotten around to breaking up with Amy. But the way Amy figures it, “Just because a couple of her former boyfriends had fallen in love with Julia didn’t mean Julia had anything to do with it” (35). Julia’s apparently just that great.
After the game, Amy, Jim, Julia, and Amy and Julia’s friend Scott hang out. With her dark vision still fresh in her mind, Julia steers the group away from a liquor store and when they stop somewhere else for refreshments, she convinces Jim to stay in the car, sending Scott in instead. This doesn’t avert disaster, however, and Scott is shot in a holdup in the gas station. Julia is horrified that she wasn’t able to avoid the horrors promised by her vision, but rather than feeling uncertainty or guilt, her first thought is of making sure the two men who held up the gas station are held accountable as she thinks “They will die. I will make them die” (50, emphasis original). Scott was shot in the head but isn’t immediately killed, and Julia is able to temporarily reign back her rage and turn her powers toward healing him, as she “closed her eyes and let the pain pour into her” (53) before realizing that his injuries are too much for her to heal without dying herself.
Scott is rushed to the hospital where he undergoes a lengthy operation and sinks into a coma. Amy stays at the hospital waiting for news of any changes in Scott’s condition, and rifles through the hospital files looking for information on the girl Julia’s mother tried to save—who has some mysterious connection with the man who shot Scott.Julia and Jim, meanwhile, run off together in pursuit of the robbers. Once again, Amy is remarkably chill about her boyfriend leaving with Julia, or maybe just resigned to the inevitability. And while Julia loves Amy and hasn’t had any interest in Amy’s previous boyfriends (however interested they may have been in her), Julia’s feelings for Jim are undeniable. But even though she loves him, that doesn’t mean she’s going to tell him the whole truth, and when she takes him back to her house, she leaves him there as she walks to the pond alone in hopes of a vision that will tell her where the robbers will strike next.
Julia ascertains the time and place of the next holdup, unsuccessfully attempts to enlist the help of the police, and then makes a plan to intervene herself, driven by anger and vengeance. When Julia and Jim enter the store, the robbers have already shot the store owner and in a moment of confusion and fear, the store owner fatally shoots Jim, with fate returning to its predestined course from Julia’s original vision. In the liquor store standoff that night, Julia puts together the pieces to discover how everything that has happened is interconnected: her mother tried to heal the girl, whose name was Kary, because she was Julia’s half-sister, the child of Julia’s father who left her and her mother when Julia was a baby. Kary was injured in a motorcycle accident when her boyfriend Frank crashed into a tree while driving drunk on a night off from committing armed robberies, because Frank is the same criminal who shot Scott in the holdup. Julia has no reservations about killing Frank and is about to give into her rage when she thinks of her mother and the power the women in her family are blessed with, concluding that “This is not why I’m here, is it?” (172). Julia heads back to the hospital, heals Scott, and dies in the attempt, believing that even if her sacrifice is not fair, “it’s right. That’s what matters” (208).
Like the protagonists of The Mind Reader and Second Sight, Julia sees more than she should be able to, but her response to these visions is much more direct and unapologetic. Julia doesn’t doubt herself or the veracity of what she has seen, and rather than waiting for someone to believe her or help her make sense of it all, she sets out in search of justice. Julia’s emotions get the better of her and even as she works to find the man who shot Scott, she knows that she is going against her mother’s advice and misusing her gift, but she claims her power in a way that the previous girls failed to do. Julia’s rage may not bring Scott back, but there is still something savagely satisfying about the idea of making Frank pay for the people his actions (and their repercussions) have hurt, a long list that includes not just Scott but also Julia, her mother, Kary, and Jim. She has the power to hold him accountable and she intends to do it. A girl with too much power is a destabilizing and terrifying proposition, however, and by the end of Pike’s book, Julia is unsurprisingly neutralized, called back to her central purpose of helping people and sacrificing herself to save Scott.
Pike’s Witch is one of the stories told in the Netflix original series The Midnight Club (2022), told by Illonka (played by Iman Benson). The Midnight Club’s version of the story redresses the exclusively white cast of characters in Pike’s novel (and the vast majority of ‘90s teen horror books), with Julia Florence transformed into Imani, a young black woman also played by Benson. The story itself is also simplified and streamlined, as Imani falls in love with a boy her friends set her up with named Ben (Igby Rigney), rather than the convoluted love triangle of falling for her best friend’s boyfriend. Imani prevents Ben from going into the liquor store she saw in her dark vision, but Imani’s friend Scottie (Ruth Codd) goes in and is shot instead. While Scottie is on life support in the hospital, Imani and Ben keep dating, until one night when they stop for gas on the way to the movies, where the same guy is holding up that store, and Ben gets shot, with fate reasserting itself, despite Imani’s best efforts to thwart it.
In both these versions of Witch, the magically gifted young woman refuses to simply accept fate: she sees what’s coming and fights to change it and to protect those she loves. This tremendous power has its limitations, however, and no one can change what’s meant to be. But the most important thing is that she tries: she doesn’t wait around for someone else to set things right, she doesn’t spend time or energy trying to make other people believe her, she doesn’t doubt herself or her abilities. She embraces her rage and her desire for vengeance, rather than playing nice and going along with someone else’s plan. She simply gets down to fighting a battle she knows deep down that she probably can’t win. She is up against insurmountable odds but refuses to accept defeat. Her power may not be infallible, but it is a testament to love and a light in the darkness.
