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Li Wan, seduced by the spirit of the original patriarch, Joseph Quincy, who built the house and infused it with his evil essence after escaping Salem Gaol, during the infamous Salem Witch trials of 1692, placed a curse on the captain’s family, and then committed suicide using a magic knife which was an heirloom from her father. She loved him and bore him a son whom the family promptly took away from her the minute the old captain passed away few years later. Li Wan could not understand how her lord’s family could be so disrespectful to their father. Pegleg’s daughter-in-law, Abigail was so strenuously opposed to Pegleg bringing a “heathen harlot” into the house with her children, she made the whole clan move out of his house while she was there. Pegleg’s sons and their respective wives did not care for Li Wan’s ethnicity, non-Christian practices and especially her questionable past. Although way too old for her, he loved Li Wan in his own way and always treated her well despite his family’s outright rejection of his “pagan baggage”.

The captain, a no nonsense man, was a widower who spent his life on the sea to get away from his family, whom he did not get along with. I was so impressed by the tale of Li Wan, the sixteen year old girl who was sold to Captain Pegleg, an aging salty dog from New England, at a Chinese brothel, which her unsympathetic relatives had sold her to when her father, a local shaman, had passed away. When I found out about the existence of the prequel, I stopped reading the novel and sought out “The Chinese Woman”. It is also the only foray by Walton into the Gothic genre, not counting the short story “The Chinese Woman” which was published in a 1981 Weird Tales collection and is a prequel to the novel that tells the origin story of the maleficia that resided in Witch House. Walton is best known for her Mabinogian Tetralogy, a fantasy re-telling of the Welsh Mabinogian, a mediaeval manuscript that contains the mythology of Wales dating back to pre-Christian times.įirst published in 1945, “Witch House” bears the distinction of being the first full-length novel to be published by Arkham House, the publishing company created by author August Derleth to collect the works of his friend H.P. I have just finished reading “Witch House”, a Gothic novel by fantasy author Evangeline Walton.