Dave's Anatomy: My Second Novella: Strange Brew

Strange Brew was the second novella I published. It took its title from an old song by the British rock group Cream:

  She’s a witch of trouble in electric blue.

  In her own mad mind, she’s in love with you.

 With you!  What are you gonna do?

 Strange brew, kills what’s inside of you.

I always interpreted the song to be about a relationship where the woman is just trouble for the guy. I thought of her as being as bad as a witch. But then one day the idea struck me:  What if a real, true-to-life witch with considerable magical powers fell in love with you? The line, “With you! What are you gonna do?” had creative resonance and I began working on the story.

The witch is English, she is named Lybecca, and she is the most powerful witch in England. She has lived for almost two millennia. And, she has recently followed the trend of many in the late 1960s and early 1970s and begun using drugs, which has deranged her mind a little bit. She meets Andrew Cabot, an American blues/rock singer who has recently hit it big and is establishing his career after two chart-topping singles. They meet, drop LSD, and spend the night together. Andrew plans to go his way, thinking Lybecca one more groupie girl. She tells him she is in love with him. He says they hardly know each other and they agree to go their separate ways. She tells him she is a witch, but he attributes her statement to being her being burnt out on hallucinogenic drugs. She agrees and goes off.

The next day at practice, Andrew feels ill. He has an attack of severe intestinal pain and his band members take him to the emergency room. The doctors tell him he has advanced gastro-intestinal cancer, chide him for not seeking treatment, and tell him there is nothing they can do to help him. The cancer is too advanced; he should have sought medical help when he first sensed something was wrong, which would have had to have been six months ago. They give him painkillers and send him home.

While he is waiting for his ride back to the flat he has rented, Lybecca appears:

She wore a minidress with wide horizontal stripes. She crossed her arms.

"Convinced?" she asked.

I could not answer for the pain. I nodded.

She got up, walked over, and touched my head.  The pain vainished

I knew she had healed me.

"I'll be at the Bronze Bell at 4:00.  See you there."

Then she was gone.

Thus their relationship begins. Andrew finds out, though talking to friends of hers who are witches, that she is mildly deranged but is too powerful for anyone to confront. Those who have crossed her up have suffered unpleasant fates. He is trapped. Yet as he gets to know her, travels time with her, and meets her daughter (whom he finds out he fathered when he and Lybecca made love on a trip to the past and his child is in fact older than he), he begins to see Lybecca someone who is hurting, vulnerable, and unhappy. He begins to feel something for her—not exactly love, but empathy.

Later, she tells him why she began to use drugs. Her other child was killed. She also tells him how she became a powerful witch by studying with a Hoodoo practitioner in the American South in the 1930s. They had a child together. The child had come to see her and had died in an accident. Only the Hoodoo man can cure her of her affliction. And his cure may not work. It may destroy her.

They go back in time to the 1930s. As Lybecca undergoes the cure, Andrew meets blues singer Robert Johnson and other bluesmen he has listened to and imitated. He also gets in a wrangle with local men over his willingness to associate with African-Americans (this is the time of segregation). After he beats one of them up, he is cornered by a group who mean to do him despite. It is at this point that Lybecca returns, cured by the magical spell, restored to her sanity. And even more in love with Andrew. Now he loves her as well. They return to the present to begin their relationship under more favorable conditions.

The novella is available, here is a link to it: Strange Brew.

For more titles, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments. Happy reading.