Griselda Holst

Griselda Holst is a Councilwoman, butcher in Holst Delicatessen and a resident of Black Spring town, and she is also a minor antagonist in Thomas olde Huevelt's 2016 book Hex.

ORIGIN
She is from an abusive household in Black Spring town and is a very fanatical devotee of the Black Rock Witch. Griselda's husband, Jim, used to beat her and her son Jaydon, and Jim was responsible for inserting hate and spite into them both. Griselda got her revenge by getting the Witch to kill Jim. No one in town knew of this act, it was her and the Witch's secret.

BIOGRAPHY
By the year 2012, Griselda is a Councilwoman and has recovered from Jim's death. She is beginning to get her life back together. She and Jaydon are running a delicatessen in town which is akin to a supermarket. Griselda is not very well liked by the townsfolk because they consider her to be a second witch - she is creepy and sociopathic and many resent her for her Council authority.

She has a habit of attempting to send anyone she dislikes to the detention center of Doodletown. Griselda finds Martin Roth slumped half-dead in the town crypt, and she brutally beats him to death just because he reminds her of her deceased husband.

Griselda gets worse after this event which takes place in the town festival. She is fearful of her own son because of his violent tendencies, and she attempts to make a deal with the Black Rock Witch to spare Griselda in exchange for the townsfolk when someone eventually does open the Witch's stitches; by giving her a live peacock sacrifice, which the Witch keeps. Apparnetly glad by this, Griselda goes on with her business, but when he brutally attacks and stones the Black Rock Witch the harsh chairman Colton Mathers forces her to resign from the council and he imprisons her son, arresting him and dragging him protesting from the house. Colton then sentences Jaydon and his prepatrators to a public flogging, despite much protest.

After the brutal flogging, Jaydon is getting more and more evil, as is Griselda, they now have nothing but hate in their eyes and Griselda even contemplates killing her son. She rationalises he has no place in the town any more. But she cannot do it.

When Stephen Grant eventually succumbs to his son's suicide and opens the Witch's stitches under promise of her resurrecting his son, Griselda becomes alarmed when a blackout hits due to the Witch's pent-up rage, plunging the town back into the Seventeenth Century. She and Jaydon leave the store, alarmed by so many enraged citizens, being outside. However, Griselda now knows when people are about to murder someone and she brutally backs in, leaving Jaydon outside, and sacrificing her own son to save herself. She cold-bloodedly watches the townsfolk beat Jaydon to death with knives.

Later, Griselda is possessed by the Witch, and bizarrely, the Witch causes Griselda to squirt her infamous pate from her uterus, feeding the town children. However, once the Witch leaves Griselda's body, Griselda is burned to death along with her delicatessen.