The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts

Miss Mayfield is happy to find a good position, returning to England after teaching in Africa. Canon Thorby runs a private school in the insular Essex town of Walwyk, remote and cut off from the world. The school is a Georgian dollhouse; the Norman church has a tower. The job comes with a darling cottage, a house lady, and a roaming black cat.

She discovers a student, Ethel, is ill-treated by her controlling grandmother, whom Ethel's friend Sydney challenges and is soon hospitalized with the flu. His mother wants to leave the town and contracts shingles; his father drowns in a pool of water. Miss Mayfield discovers a little figure made of wax hidden in a desk and is mysteriously struck down, they say she had an accident, and awakens in a hospital with no memory of the past three years. Warned away by the hotbed of gossip about her, she returns to jog her memory and discovers strange rituals in the woods. A found letter cautions her that they are all, every one, involved. She discovers it's true when she witnesses a candlelit gathering of naked debauchery on the night of All Hallowse'en, deliberate obscenity offering flesh to the Usurper so perverted "to call it bestial was to insult every animal in creation."

It takes a while to get there, but this satisfies if you are looking for modern English witchcraft. Like Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby, there is an undercurrent of sinister malevolence throughout. Formerly published under the pseudonym Peter Curtis as The Devil's Own, this was republished as The Witches by Curtis to tie in with the British film version of the same name starring Joan Fontaine in her last screen role.

1960 / Hardcover / 320 pages