The Lighthouse Witches

The Island and Its Secrets

The Isle of Lòn is not a real place, but it feels like one — a remote Scottish island reachable only by boat, with a lighthouse that dates back centuries, a landscape of bleak moorland and dramatic coastline, and a community shaped by generations of isolation. C.J. Cooke uses this setting with the precision of someone who knows how landscape becomes mythology in places like this.

The Lighthouse Witches operates on a dual timeline. In 1998, Liv Dark arrives on the island with her three daughters — Sapphire, Clover, and Luna — to take a commission painting murals inside the lighthouse. The job pays well and Liv needs the money. The murals will depict the island’s history of witch trials — the burning of local women in the seventeenth century — and as Liv researches the history for the paintings, something begins to happen to her daughters. Sapphire and Clover vanish. Luna, only a child, disappears.

Twenty years later, in the present timeline, Saffy returns to the island to search for her missing sisters. The youngest, Luna, has apparently been found — still the same age she was when she disappeared two decades earlier.

The Wilding Mythology

The central supernatural element involves local folklore about “wildlings” — creatures that can take human form to steal children, leaving changeling substitutes behind. Cooke incorporates this mythology carefully, using it in ways that feel rooted in actual Scottish folk tradition rather than invented for the occasion. The historical research behind the witch trial elements is particularly thorough; the 17th-century sections of the novel are grounded in documented practices of witch persecution that makes them all the more disturbing.

The wildlings work as a horror device because Cooke deploys them with restraint. The supernatural elements are introduced slowly, through accumulation of detail and atmosphere, and the reader is never entirely certain whether what is happening has a supernatural explanation or a mundane one. This ambiguity sustains the thriller tension into the late stages of the novel.

Dual Timeline Craft

The alternating past and present timelines each have their own distinct emotional register. The 1998 Liv sections are about desperation and maternal anxiety — a mother watching her children slip away in a place she cannot understand, making decisions under pressure that she cannot fully account for later. The present-day Saffy sections are about the adult legacy of childhood trauma — what it means to have been the surviving sister, the one who wasn’t taken, and to have lived twenty years in that shadow.

Both timelines sustain interest, which is not a given with dual timeline structure. The revelation of how they connect is handled with genuine skill — not as a surprise twist but as an understanding that deepens both narratives simultaneously.

What Works and What Doesn’t

The novel’s greatest strength is its atmosphere. Cooke creates the island’s physical and psychological environment with a precision that makes it feel entirely real. The Gothic elements — isolation, old evil, the way the landscape seems to resist the presence of outsiders — are embedded in specific sensory detail rather than vague unease.

The weakest element is the resolution, which requires the reader to accept a fairly elaborate supernatural explanation. Readers who want their Gothic thrillers to ultimately resolve into realism will be disappointed; readers who accept the genre’s conventions regarding the actual supernatural will find the resolution satisfying.

The Scottish Historical Element

The novel’s engagement with Scotland’s history of witch trials is its most intellectually substantial element. Real historical events involving the persecution of women as witches in Scotland are woven through the narrative as context for the lighthouse murals and for the island’s deep suspicion of certain kinds of women. This historical grounding gives the supernatural elements a social and political dimension that elevates the novel above straightforward horror.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A genuinely atmospheric Gothic thriller that uses Scottish folklore with intelligence. The dual timeline sustains tension throughout, and the island setting is unforgettable.