How to Catch Fairies

This book is called How to Catch Fairies which you might think to mean something like “how to find the magic inside yourself” or “craft shopping on a budget,” but it’s exactly what it sounds like. The author and witch, Gilly Sergiev, seems to really believe the night is filled with mythic creatures you can abduct and molest.

To be more clear, you won’t be catching a lot of fairies. The title is a lie, or at best, a 2002 book store’s version of clickbait. Most of the fairies can’t be captured, and from her descriptions, they can’t be seen or touched either. What Gilly does include is a lot of traditional spells which my research suggests she made up and added the word “traditional” to. These usually involve mixing a few herbs together and performing some self-delusion exercises while pretending really hard there are magical sprites nearby. Let me get even more clear: the author of How to Catch Fairies is very stupid, but thinks you, the reader, are even stupider.

As you’d expect, every type of fairy requires a different hunting technique. For example, it’d be absurd to think you could capture a Mist Spriggan with a trap made for a Night Santa. Unfortunately, the instructions for catching them are always dangerously incomplete and printed in a tiny, unreadable cursive font, sometimes on a background of the same color. Go ahead and try to squint your way through these instructions on catching a dwarf before he’s escaped and reported you for a hate crime:

Assuming the creatures known as “dwarves” are real, you catch one by writing your name and your problem on a piece of paper and burying it. This would explain why the author’s neighbors keep finding little notes in the cul de sac that say “GILLY – LONLY” and “GILLY – WISH WAS SMART AND DWARFS ARE REAL.”

If you did it right, and who would fucking know if you did, a dwarf will appear! Or your problem will be solved! Gilly assures you “you will know instantly when the magick starts,” which means you can only catch a dwarf if you decide one was responsible for something good in your life and the only reason such an unlikely thing could ever happen is magick. I’m not saying this book is only for delusional losers, but the logic is clear: you have to be one if you’re going to make this dwarf-catching plan work.

Catching a hobgoblin is a little bit more humiliating than catching a dwarf. What you want to do is have a picnic, but leave a seat open for a hobgoblin. Make sure none of your friends sit in the hobgoblin’s spot which should contain a glass of beer in a ritual circle of puka shells. Now you just party, with the kind of people who party with fairy catchers, and keep checking back in with the empty place to see if a hobgoblin has joined you! Your friends may laugh at you and never speak to you again, but at least when you’re arrested for having an open container at the park you can tell authorities it was the hobgoblin’s, it was the hobgoblin’s, let me go aiiiiiieeeeee it was the hobgoblin’s.

Okay, let’s stop screwing around with these weak ass mini fairies. Let’s catch something more dangerous. Let’s catch a… holy shit, there’s one for catching a Giant?

Okay, Gilly seems to know giants don’t exist, so the best you can do is ask a mountain to fill your life with the “safety and goodness” of a giant. Which begs the question, which goddamn fairy tales are Gilly going off of? Giants, to my understanding, are just large people who eat the normal-sized. Since when do they merge with volcanoes and offer nebulous “goodness” to people who put candles in bread? This is nuts– you wander around a mountain watching bread candles flicker until you find a spot with no wind and walk in a circle? And the only way you know if it worked is if you kind of feel like you might have more “giant qualities?” You didn’t catch a giant, you idiot witch. You just lit your lunch on fire during a nature hike and had your wish of “indeterminate feelings” granted. I get we’re not doing science here, but how is this “spell” any different from “nothing?”

We should catch something dark and serious next. Like a… whoa, a banshee!?

It turns out banshees, spirits who wail horrifyingly at corpses, are good actually because it helps verify your loved ones are truly dead. Plus, if I’m reading this correctly, battling one for your life is a refreshing pick-me-up! These are the types of points Gilly makes in between tips on building merman traps.

We all sort of live in our own little worlds with their own subjective rules. Maybe you think cats can see ghosts or that vaginas have “g-spots.” It’s hard to tell what’s regular real and what’s the real you wish was real, but one way you can measure reality is to consider the consequences of being wrong. If it turns out your cat can’t see ghosts or there actually is a secret place you can “poke” to “assemble an orgasm,” what would happen? Well, in the example I’ve given, being wrong means you die from ghost ambush and none of your exes like you enough to attend your funeral. Now that you know the stakes, you check all available data. So buy as many papers as you can and check to see how many sad ghost ambush obituaries there are. In my test run, about 8% of them were, which means cats see some ghosts, and one in every 12 and a half women experience pleasure.

Maybe I’m not explaining it well. What I’m trying to say is that Gilly is provably a dumbshit, but maybe there’s a way we can test if she’s also a liar. Does she believe this nonsense herself? Well, it seems anyone who believes in magical creatures of lore must also believe there’s a certain amount of danger in fucking with them. So let’s look at one of the rituals for catching something less benevolent than a party goblin or a mountain feeling and see how she deals with the potential danger of a reader really seeing one.

So if you’re hunting a harpy, you “hang around” on the beach, singing and whistling. That’s it, that’s the whole ritual, but wait, she does mention, “If you’re a male, prepare to meet your doom.” Holy crap, my doom? T-there’s not, like, a magick move I can do or an apology whistle? The men reading your book are just dead from something you told them to do? Jesus, Gilly.

This is what I mean. Maybe she’s a murderer, sure, but if this witch truly believed invisible monsters were out in the water waiting to kill whistling men, wouldn’t she devote more than half a sentence to harpy safety? This dingbat knows you’re not going to meet a siren, but I’m not sure if it makes her book less pathetic or more pathetic. Speaking of pathetic, she seems to be catching a lot of these imaginary creatures so they can fuck.

Meet the fairshee, a tiny fairy man so beautiful you can’t help but fall in love with him. “It can be great fun to spend time with them,” types the fairy book author into her Microsoft Word document.

“It looks like you’re writing too horny to be writing,” suggests Clippy, her virtual helper. “Upgrade to the Office Pro Suite for over 30 high-resolution (640 x 480) pictures of balls!”

If you’re interested in catching a fairshee, it’s actually pretty easy if you have no self-respect and a lot of imagination. First you have to play it cool. They are not into desperate witches. So you spend a week very deliberately thinking about fairshees and then really, really not thinking about them. If you do it right, one will appear in your dreams. Then you… well, I guess your subconscious starts sucking and fucking. To be clear, the best case scenario for this lengthy magickal ritual is you have a dream where you get laid by a very small man dressed like your starting level bard.

If you’re looking for a sexual fairy relationship while you’re still awake, you’ll want to catch a nymph. They appear to you if you go into the woods with a “deep need.” And I know what you’re thinking, amateur witches: “DEEP NEED!? DEEP NEED DOES NOT BEGIN TO DESCRIBE WHAT MY YEARNING BODY IS READY FOR.”

Okay, I hear you and you’re in luck. Gilly says if you “have particular need,” what you’ll want to do is find a natural shrine and put some of your clothes on it. Maybe you were expecting some kind of herbal ointments or mushroom circles, but no, you only need to go into the woods -very horny- and start getting naked. It’s how the pros fuck ghosts in the forest.

Now, to catch a gnome Gilly says you… hold on, this is just a story about a water stain on her wall that sort of looks like little men. And, oh. Oh, she named them. She named the shapes on her wall and after she talked to them she realized how lucky she was to have them as friends. This is quite something. You don’t normally see a writer capture loneliness so crushingly outside of a suicide note. I don’t know if I have a joke for it. I think I’d better Google this author and make sure she’s still alive.

Oh.

Not only is Gilly alive, but she has been desperately sexless for quite some time writing books about how to summon cock. She can’t stay focused on any other subject. As we’ve seen here, even when she sets out to publish a book on fairy kidnapping, she always ends up writing about her true passion– wishing really hard something would fuck her.

This post was brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme patron, Nick Heyman, who thinks about Fairshees so rarely they have sex with him in his dreams every night.