This guest review is from Lucynka! Lucynka is a long-time lurker, who has occasionally commented under a couple different names in the past. Over the last few years, she’s become really interested in the history of the romance genre, particularly those forgotten or oft-overlooked parts. You can find her on Bluesky @lucynka.bsky.social, or else over on her WordPress, where she blogs about “obscure bullshit,” including a lot of romance pulp magazines from the 1920s-’40s.
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Back again, with another pick from Heather S’s Half Price Books excursion from earlier in the year. If The Lilac Ghost caught my eye because it looked potentially good, then Love’s Magic Spell caught my eye because it looked so ludicrously bad. To refresh, here’s the cover copy:
When lovely Sara Nichols came to Louisiana to sell the family’s newly inherited plantation, Bellecourt, love was the furthest thing from her mind. But tall, handsome Piers Lamont had other plans for Sara. A notorious ladies’ man, Piers was intent on making Sara his personal property.
And wealthy, young Lee Sherman seemed equally determined to keep Sara entertained. But suddenly strange rites of voodoo magic closed in on her, and the true terrors of Bellecourt revealed themselves. It was only then that Sara knew her fate rested with one of these two men—but could she trust her heart to choose wisely…?
So yes, we have a Louisiana plantation, Voodoo, and a love interest who’s intent on making the heroine “his personal property.” This has ALL the red flags, but you know what? At this point, I’ve made my way through more than my fair share of horrendously offensive pulp stories from the early 20th century, so I figured I probably had enough defenses built up to take one for the team, wade through this pile of problematic, and pull out anything inadvertently entertaining.
I was SO READY for this book to go beyond mere “bad” and into “utterly batshit,” was SO READY to bestow that golden unicorn of Smart Bitches ratings, the elusive F+, onto it.
And to be fair, it really looked like that was how things were going to go for a while! I mean, check out the promisingly bonkers teaser:
SHE WAS BACK IN THE DARK STAIRWAY AT BELLECOURT—
Julius and his robed disciples filed up the dark stairs searching for her. She heard the sound of their relentless advancing footsteps echoing up the black corridor, the throb of the tom-tom drum, and the disturbing rattle of the calabash gourd. Desperately she tried to shut out the ominous beat, the wailing, chanting voices, but they sounded louder by the second. She had just realized there was no escape from her prison when she saw the serpent slither from the shadows toward her and she fell sobbing and screaming against the locked panel door.
“Sara…stop it!” Gentle hands were pulling her up, and Piers’s voice was talking to her.
“Piers? We have to get away…they’re coming.” She struggled to get the words out.
Strong arms pressed her against his chest. “It’s all right, Sara. Nothing will hurt you while I’m here…”
Who the hell is Julius? (Is the “Lee” of the back cover actually short for “Julius”?) If Sara is presumably locked in some sort of cell/cellar by herself, then where did Piers come from? Is the serpent a metaphor (for either sin or a penis or both)? Did Julius get a bulk discount on his disciples’ robes? So many questions!
Sadly, it’s all downhill from there, and the rating—as you can see—ended up being just a plain, old F. For (wet) fart, I like to think.
The plot, such as it is, sees young Chicagoan Sara Nichols traveling down to New Orleans to oversee the sale of Bellecourt, a plantation house that her aunt just recently inherited. Said aunt has—*ahem*—fond memories of the place, but definitely doesn’t have the money to renovate it, and can’t go herself to oversee the sale because she just broke her foot. The paperwork admittedly could be handled by mail, but for—*ahem*—sentimental reasons, Auntie still wants someone from the family to give it one last visit and send-off. Hence our intrepid heroine, and the back cover would seem to imply sinister happenings once she gets down there, and perhaps even that the property is “cursed” in some way.
Ignoring the romanticization of a plantation house and the cultural appropriation of Voodoo here (a tall order, I know, but let’s just try it for a moment), this is at least a decent structural set-up: Fish-out-of-water heroine gets caught up in a deeper, darker plot that threatens her very safety, and is unsure who—if anyone—she can trust.
The problem (one among many) is that the book never actually delivers on that front. I went charging in with all my mental armor on, ready for some offensive, exploitative Gothic Voodoo shenanigans, and instead what I got was a seemingly never-ending series of dinner dates. Or lunch dates. Or breakfasts. I kept waiting for the main plot to kick in, only to get to the end, whereupon I realized, “Oh. Oh, okay. I guess all that dinner-date bullshit was the main plot. Good to know.”
One particularly egregious part of the story sees Sara getting a very detailed, four-page walk-through of a sugarcane processing plant, apparently just so Glenna Finley can let us know she did her research. Even worse is the way the author seems to subconsciously know on some level that this is boring as fuck, because she proceeds to tease us with the sort of story we could be reading right now, had we only loved ourselves more and made better life choices:
“The filter cake goes back out to the fields where it’s used as fertilizer. The clear juice is piped on to the evaporator.” Lee led her along another catwalk for a few minutes until they came to a complex of machinery looking like a gigantic laboratory with its vats and complicated pipe connections.
“All this needs is a mad scientist running around in a long white coat stuffing the heroine into the boiling syrup,” Sara told him.
“We only let him out nights when the moon is full. Right now we’re requisitioning some vestal virgins to go in the cauldrons. If you’d like to volunteer…” he paused hopefully.
“I am sorry but I already have an appointment for the first full moon,” she said. “There’s a werewolf living in the apartment above us who plans his get-togethers ages ahead. Last month there was a sit-down orgy for twenty-four.”
Mad scientists and werewolf orgies? DON’T THREATEN ME WITH A GOOD TIME, GLENNA FINLEY. I live-blogged my reading experience over on Bluesky, and at one point, bored out of my skull, I actually demanded in exasperation, “WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET TO THE OFFENSIVE, APPROPRIATIVE VOODOO???” Because, truly, anything would be better than this.
It takes a whole third of the book for Sara to even visit Bellecourt, at which point we finally get our first hint of Gothic shit: In an unintentionally apt bit of symbolism, the house is literally rotting from the inside out, making it physically dangerous to venture into. As such, Sara is waiting for Piers to meet her, to act as her guide in looking the place over, only she gets impatient and—like a dumbass—decides to go exploring on her own. Cue the front door blowing shut behind her, somehow trapping her in total darkness, and in an attempt to find her bearings, she reaches out and her hand touches…wait for it…something bloody on a banister! Alas, it turns out to simply be the rooster Julius—the old (white) caretaker of the place, and definitely not Lee Sherman of the cover copy—killed for his dinner.
There are precisely three instances in this book where it looks like something exciting might happen. (Not even does happen, mind you, merely might happen.) The first is the above rooster incident. The second is when…
TW for graphic animal violence
Sara finds a dead garden mole tied to her motel doorknob, with all four of its paws cut off
…which is a genuinely gruesome bit of imagery, and one that frankly deserves to be in a much better story. (RIP to you, garden mole.)
And the third instance is when Sara stumbles upon Julius’s religious support group and jumps to the wrong conclusion, and I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.
But no, seriously, all the purported, sinister Voodoo shit? Turns out to be Julius just doing his thing. On the one hand I guess it’s nice that Voodoo isn’t presented as some evil cult (even if Julius is the only one who genuinely practices it, and the other characters regard him rather patronizingly for it), but on the other hand THIS IS NOT THE STORY I SIGNED UP FOR. And maybe this wouldn’t bother me so much if the rest of the novel was actually interesting in some respect. But, as stated, it isn’t.
And that promisingly bonkers teaser? In one of the most rage-inducing cases of bait-and-switch I have ever come across, it turns out to be JUST A DREAM, WTF. The reason Piers seems to appear from out of nowhere in that scene is because he’s literally waking Sara up from a nightmare.
Absolutely no one should read this book (certainly not now, and not even back in 1974, when it was published), so I’m just going to get all spoilery here and tell you that the whole “conflict” of the story boils down to nothing more than a little bit of real estate drama: Basically, Sara’s aunt has to sell, and Bellecourt’s neighbor, Colonel Sherman (father of Lee), wants to buy, to expand his sugarcane farm. Sounds pretty perfect, especially as he eventually might even be able to restore the house to its former—*ahem*—glory.
Except this is a lie, and he actually plans to resell the property to a big chemical company, who will bulldoze the house and put a factory in its place, MUAHAHAHA! To facilitate this plan, Colonel Sherman bad-mouthed Sara to Julius (who is bizarrely in love with Bellecourt, to the extent that you almost expect him to announce his marriage to the building), at which point Julius became the colonel’s unwitting lackey, planting the rooster and the mole in an attempt to frighten Sara—the idea being that she’d take care of the paperwork ASAP so she could GTFO. This retroactively means that Sara was never even in any real peril, which—if you’re familiar with the Gothic romance and/or romantic suspense subgenre(s)—is practically a heinous crime in and of itself; someone should at least be trying to kill this bitch.
On top of all that is the rampant Southern apologia and white-washing of history (I honestly lost count of the number of times the terms “servants” and “slaves” were used interchangeably, and THOSE ARE TWO VERY DIFFERENT THINGS, GLENNA FINLEY). At the end of the day, I have a hard time getting emotionally invested in the story, because I have a hard time seeing how the destruction of a plantation house—this glorified symbol of slavery—is supposed to be a tragedy. Like, idk, maybe it should be bulldozed to the ground. Or perhaps set on fire? I guess I should be glad it ends up being sold to a local historical society, with plans to turn it into a museum (you know, as opposed to a wedding venue), but considering everything else on display here, I don’t know if I trust said society to actually address its fraught history in any meaningful way.
“Okay, that’s all terrible, but what about the romance?” I hear you asking. Dear readers, it too SUCKS BALLS.
First of all, the love triangle the cover copy seems to set up is in fact one more lie, because it’s pretty clear from the get-go that Piers is the official love interest here—Lee is little more than a distraction for a couple scenes and an excuse to make Piers jealous. And how to describe Piers? HOO BOY.
We’re introduced to this Piece of Work in the first paragraph, where he’s thinking about how the local government should plant hot women on the roadsides instead of trees, and he frankly never gets any better. His and Sara’s relationship mostly consists of them snapping at each other, for reasons I never fully comprehended, because the author doesn’t seem to understand how human emotions work. Ostensibly Glenna Finley was trying to go for belligerent sexual tension here, a kind of enemies-to-lovers thing, but it completely falls flat because there is no sexual tension—just two weird, prickly assholes who are willfully determined to misunderstand each other AT EVERY SINGLE TURN, I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Sara and Piers are EXHAUSTING. It honestly doesn’t even seem as if they like each other, and yet I’m somehow supposed to believe in their HEA?
Add to that the fact that Piers is an arrogant, insulting ass, with a habit of violently shaking Sara (and who later threatens to not only spank her so hard she “won’t be able to sit down for a week,” but who also threatens to full-on backhand her), and the so-called “romance” goes from being merely incomprehensible to outright gross. Like, there’s overbearing, old-skool romance novel heroes, and then there’s…this guy. It’s a bad sign when the biggest physical threat to your heroine turns out to be her designated love interest, yikes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when the third act break came, my immediate reaction was “GOOD!”—Sara’s not exactly a prize peach of a protagonist, but holy moly, she at least deserves better than Piers. Alas, the end sees her giving up her life in Chicago to be with him in Louisiana (for anyone who cares, he’s revealed to work for the previously-mentioned historical society), and we don’t even get an apology out of him—it is in fact Sara who apologizes, and then she…just pluckily resigns herself to Piers’s refusal to properly communicate, basically. It’s pretty fucking grim, made all the worse by the way the Southerner “wins over” the Northerner, as is the case in so many romance novels that—whether explicitly or implicitly—uphold the “Lost Cause” narrative:
Sara found herself clutching her purse and made an effort to relax. “Piers, are you sure your sister wants to spend all that money on Bellecourt? You’re sure she can afford it?”
“Positive. Her husband practically has a direct wire to Fort Knox. Besides, he’s almost as anxious to rebuild Bellecourt as Tessa.” Piers’ drawl became more evident. “Nothing like converting a northerner now and then to help the cause.”
UGH. DIE IN A FIRE, PIERS. AND TAKE BELLECOURT WITH YOU.
Research indicates that Glenna Finley specialized not so much in Gothics, but in more standard romantic suspense, and she also seems to have specialized in “travelogue” romances, that allowed the reader to vicariously experience far-away places. This makes sense in hindsight, as the depiction of New Orleans culture—and especially food culture—is perhaps the only redeeming aspect of Love’s Magic Spell (though there are suspiciously no Black characters to speak of, in fucking New Orleans, save for one driver/porter, so I’m still withholding any points I might otherwise award the author here).
The other single worthwhile thing about this book is an outfit Sara wears to one of her innumerable dinner dates, that consists of a silver skirt, a magenta-and-silver striped top, and blue eyeshadow. Good god, I want it, just like I want that jacket/dress on the cover.
In other news, out of sheer, perverse curiosity, I actually read another Glenna Finley title immediately after this (1983’s Wanted For Love), just to see if all of her novels were such heinously boring clusterfucks, and to my pleasant surprise, it appears the answer is “no.” (I mean, Wanted For Love still wasn’t good—I would probably rate it a solid C, if you twisted my arm for a letter grade—but that’s still way better than an F, yeah? The romance, while still incomprehensible, at least wasn’t worrying the way it is here, and there were actual stakes at play—who knew!)
But back to Love’s Magic Spell. Do yourself a favor and never read this fucking book. And if someone you know is considering reading it, do them a favor by knocking it out of their hands.
Please, I beg of you. Don’t let my sacrifice be in vain.
