Diabolical Plots #104, October 2023

“Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots in Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke

Reviewed by Geoff Houghton

This month’s story is “Like Ladybugs, Bright Spots in Your Mailbox” by Marie Croke. It is set in present day Washington DC and tells the story of acts of unauthorised feminine witchcraft and the response of the male-dominated corporate machine that has taken over US witchcraft. The corporate managers see these small and joyous acts of magic as a manifestly Un-American activity. Their response is to hunt down the brazen witch, who dares to deliver this form of magical socialism by freely dispensing magical benefits to all and sundry without prompt and proper billing.

The first-person female narrator is an able but junior-grade witch whose abilities far outstrip her rank thanks to the inherent biases of the corporate system. She wryly watches as the pushy male executives of the Washington coven are unable to track down and stamp out this blatant undermining of their monopoly, and then sets out to prove her greater ability by cleverly unravelling the mystery that her male “superiors” were unable to solve.

This works out about as well as could be predicted in any corporate structure where an able subordinate solves a problem and simultaneously shows up the inadequacies of her superiors—she receives immediate but insincere verbal praise for her efforts and is then side-lined by management as a disrupter of the corporate status-quo.

It is clear that the author is wholeheartedly on the side of the female rebels against the male magicians and by the end of the story, her principal character is entirely in agreement with her creator and becomes a rebel herself. The actual system of magic in this story is cleverly devised but in the end it is secondary to the feminist agenda that all corporate America, magical or mundane, is institutionally biased against females and in favour of male “clones” of the existing management.

Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.