A haunting descent into faith, power, and the stories women tell to survive their own truths
What is power to those least powerful among us? What is agency to those stripped of it? And where is the meaning of that violence? These questions, among countless others, C.F. Hayes interrogates in The Magic Circle—a novel which builds its entire architecture upon transgression.
Framed as the posthumous diary of Mary Armstrong, the daughter of a celebrated U.S. senator whose private sanctity bears little resemblance to his public polish, the book trades in the volatile territory where theology, sexuality, and psychological excavation intersect. What begins as the intimate self-inquiry of a wounded woman soon widens into a meditation on how belief systems are constructed to explain the inexplicable, and to conceal what powerful people would rather leave buried.
Told through undated diary entries assembled and extrapolated upon by a friend, the narrative often takes on the furtive, confessional quality of a document never meant for public eyes. Mary’s voice is fierce, erudite, and often unsettling, while the narrative explanation of each diaristic outburst blends grounding context with mythic lore, deepening the implications of Mary’s own musings. The “canons”—audacious, luminous, and at times disturbing assertions of the unfolding philosophies—function like holy writ turned inside out, offering a worldview in which orgasm becomes proof of the divine and taboo becomes the gateway to truth. Together, these passages attempt to articulate a cosmos in which the sacred is indistinguishable from the physical—ancient ritual, comparative mythology, sexual trauma, and etymology woven together.
However, between a lack of interrogation and a structure that refuses to orient itself, Mary is often presented uncritically, as a kind of visionary thinker. The novel’s philosophical scaffolding is built on assertions Mary treats as revelation, but which the text does not convincingly support. This yielding to Mary’s obsession with locating orgasm at the root of religion, commerce, creativity, even war, reads less like radical insight when it is so blatantly unquestioned.
Where the novel succeeds tremendously is in its raw depiction of a family gutted by generational abuse. Though timelines meander and accounts become unreliable in their deference, even reverence, to personal expression, the narrative remains anchored in the human cost inspiring this cosmic theorizing. Mary’s intellectual flights are rooted in the rot of a powerful family whose private life corrodes every public performance of respectability. Her sisters fracture under different coping mechanisms while their mother clings to Southern decorum, and their father thrives on the sheen of political invincibility. Through Mary’s interactions with her family, we see how institutions collude in creating myths that protect men like her father; through her inability to topple him from that pedestal, we see how such protections are nothing compared to that which is afforded by love.
What elevates The Magic Circle beyond its provocative content is Hayes’ deft psychological realism. Mary is both hyper-perceptive and deeply unreliable, and her diary becomes a hall of mirrors where trauma, interpretation, and myth blur. The result is a narrative that resists clean judgments. Is Mary a philosopher of female interiority or a woman reinterpreting her own harm into a theology she can survive? The book refuses to answer. That uncertainty is its power.
Dark, demanding, and intellectually electric, The Magic Circle is a novel for readers who crave fiction that unsettles as much as it enlightens. It interrogates the stories we inherit, the rituals we cling to, and the lengths to which the wounded will go to make meaning out of devastation.
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