I wanted to have another look at the
references to Christmas Eve. I was also hoping to find some previously overlooked
material about witches, but instead I noticed for the first time that a conversation
between two of the characters resonates with what I now know about cults.
This dialogue was written in 1935. It is
uncanny how relevant and significant it is when we look at the methods cults
use to recruit their victims and what constitutes an effective resistance to
these techniques. I missed all this in past readings of the book but can see it
now.
Maria Jones and the evil witch
One of the characters in the book is a girl
called Maria Jones. She is a friend of Kay Harker, the young hero.
She is just a small child; she is known to
everyone as ‘little Maria’. She is blunt, tough and fearless, rather like Joan
Aiken’s Dido Twite in The Cuckoo Tree. She loves guns and has gangsters on
the brain.
Maria shows that she has more sense than many
adults who are manipulated into joining cults or other unethical organisations
when the witch Sylvia Daisy Pouncer and her villainous husband Abner Brown
decide that Maria shows promise and would be a good acquisition for their gang.
They kidnap and imprison her. Sylvia Daisy
tries to persuade her to join them. Maria is not fooled; she is defiant and not
at all daunted and she stands up for herself very well.
