The Wax Child
An astounding, haunting tale of accused witches―a book of sorcery itself―from the celebrated author of The Employees and My Work
In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noblewoman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man who gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or death. They are all in danger of the stake.
The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe.
Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn also weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.
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Olga Ravn
Olga Ravn is a Danish author whose fiction has a habit of crossing boundaries: between literary fiction and science fiction, poetry and prose, history and the supernatural, the human body and the systems that attempt to control it. Whether writing about humanoid workers aboard a distant spacecraft or witchcraft in seventeenth-century Denmark, she uses the strange and speculative to examine questions that remain recognizably human.
Born in Copenhagen in 1986, Ravn emerged first as a poet before expanding into novels, criticism, translation, and experimental forms of writing. Poetry remains visible in the way she constructs her fiction. Her novels often resist straightforward storytelling, relying instead on fragments, testimonies, shifting voices, and unusual narrators to create stories that feel assembled from pieces of evidence.
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