I would call this a misplaced story. It seems like it could be a good story, with lots of Stephen King overtones... but you’ve gone an d misplaced it, like a set of car keys left in the pocket of a dirty pair of pants buried in the laundry hamper. You’ll need to go searching for it.

I’m not sure how much time I should spend on what is on the page, since my ultimate verdict is to start from scratch and tell your actual story, instead of leaving it off stage, as it is now, and merely telling us about your story. Telling us that a story took place is the TV solution: that’s when there’s no budget for the battle scene, the building collapse, the cruise liner sinking or the car bomb in the market place, so we get a quick cut to the aftermath and offer two characters talking to each other about what has happened. It’s a cheat on TV, but it’s so ubiquitous that we pretty much expect it. In prose, with no budgetary constraints, or any other for that matter, it’s unforgivable.

The problem is you now think Jake is your main character. Unfortunately, so will your readers. Like a real main character, Jake fills the frame from the outset. He is the point of view character, our access to the emotional and psychological inner workings of whatever is in store. Various issues are presented as potential problems that he will be called upon to deal with as the story progresses. That’s how a main character commands our attention: they bring with them an actual narrative arc, complete with decisions that need to be made, actions that must be taken as a result, and the usual unintended consequences that must then be dealt with. You know, all that plot stuff.

You begin promisingly enough.

You can never go home.

Actually, the line you are appropriating ends with the word again, but it’s achieved meme status by now in the culturescape, so we know what you’re getting at. But understand: when you evoke such thematic concerns in the opening sentence of your story, you set up reasonable expectations for your reader. These expectations are further refined in the remaining sentences of your first paragraph and the one that follows: we’re in a family drama dealing in some way with a son whose changes in college mesh less and less comfortably with the world of the family he’s left behind.

Oops. Not really. As soon as you can get Jake and his brother away from the dining table they are in their truck heading for Sally’s, the local bar and all-round hangout, where they remain for the rest of the story. Something about readers: they will approach a new story with a certain measure of good will, an assumption that you know what you are doing and won’t waste their time, and a batch of empty memory registers waiting to be filled with the various bits of information you present us, saving them for the time when you take advantage of them, building your unfolding narrative. If you never take advantage of them, they’ll just sit there in your reader’s mind, taking up space and needless attention. Do enough of this, they will come to the conclusion that information you present is unimportant. At that point they will stop reading.

You continue tossing crumbs in your reader’s path, all leading to dead ends. We hear about Zeke and his ride mower and the trouble he's had with Sheriff Burke, along with an oblique reference to Zeke's jeep. None of these has anything to do with the oncoming proceedings. Inside the bar, we meet Billie, and after an introductory interaction with Jake, we think perhaps there's something between them. Perhaps part of that "You can never go home again," sentiment. But no. It's just a conversation. There's a young couple off to the side who warrant a couple of mentions, but they too are just there for decoration. They contribute nothing beyond the fact that characters are needed to populate the bar and they got hired. Jake mentions a girl he's been seeing, that he might consider bringing her home to meet the family... but it's not really serious at the moment, which begs the question why mention her at all? The aforereferenced Zeke is present, as a kind of alcoholic Greek chorus. Like the fool in medieval courts, he's permitted to speak truth, since no one pays attention to him. He tells Jake, "Boy, there's no dealin' with with women that ain't too serious." Apparently he agrees with my assessment. You've also made two throwaway references to an approaching storm, once when they get out of the truck to enter the bar, and later, in paragraph 19.

With the exception of the storm, every one of the elements you’ve presented thus far is a violation of The Law of Chekov’s Gun, which states that if you show us a gun in Act I, it needs to go off in Act III. So far your story is littered with guns that will never be fired. The converse is also true: if you determine that you will need a gun in Act III, you can’t just call it up out of thin air. It has to be introduced in Act I. You have violated this version of the rule in the way that you now wait until you are halfway into your story to casually mention that “Everybody in the county knew that Myra Sykes was a witch.” Everybody, that is, but your readers. They’ll probably wonder, given that this is the pivotal element in your plot, why thay’re just finding out about it now. However, this is part of the larger structural problem I’ll get to in a minute.

Here's the aforementioned Paragraph 19:

Against the low rumble of the approaching storm and the soft clatter of pool balls, minutes passed into hours as Jake filled them in on the goings on at the University. Soon the conversation turned and Jake sipped his beer with tight lipped amusement as Zeek, Billie, and his brother drawled endlessly about the Democrats, the Dark Web, and their nefarious machinations against our nation.

That number is important. 19 paragraphs have come and gone and still your characters are simply chatting. Kind of like real life. Nothing much ever happens in real life. It's pretty boring, really. Stories are triggered by "What if" questions: what if things took a detour off the normal path and wandered into strange territory? You recognize this, and you are about to do your best to take one of those detours, but if your main character hasn't discovered his reason for being in your story by the nineteenth paragraph, few readers will stick around to see if he ever will.

Now Mitch Sykes enters the bar, and here is when the narrative you've been telling begins to overlap the actual story that you should have instead been telling all along. The way a successful story structure works is you have an inner story, which gathers itself around your main character, and you have an outer story, against which the main character is thrust. The outer story is where we find our protagonist, the driving force that propels all other movement, the reason for the story in the first place. It is when the main character's arc conflicts with the outer story arc that we get all that confusion and interaction that pushes you into an Act III. But you've already locked yourself into an untenable situation. As I said before, your main character has no storyline, and now we see why. Mitch should have been your main character all along. But as things are now structured, he is inaccessible to us. It's his story, after all. He's the one with all the interest, drama, choices, mistakes and flaws that would make us want to read about him to see 1) how badly he screws his life up, and 2) how, or if, he manages to get out of the hole into which he's dug himself. He's a perfect main character in that regard.

Instead, we have to experience him second hand, through the boring eyes of Jake, about whom no one will be interested because he has no story. Nothing. 19 paragraphs of this and that have proven beyond a doubt that he has no story gathering itself around him, and thus has offered no reason for us to wonder, "What's he gonna do next?" We already know. Not much.

Meanwhile, Mitch is in the midst of a King Hell Gonzo of a story, but it's forever separated from us by an impenetrable narrative buffer. Doesn't matter what he's talking about. Doesn't matter how dramatic, how horrific the events he's narrating. None of that is available to us. All we get is a guy in a bar talking. We don't get to see things through his eyes, we don't have access to his thoughts or the internal turmoil he's dealing with. We see his surface appearance as Jake sees him.

Then, there's your protagonist, Myra. Myra has triggered the events with which all the other characters are concerned. Myra is the driving force of your story. So you see the problem, I hope? We only experience Myra through Mitch, who we only experience through Jake. In other words, all the drama, tension, character interaction and conflict that would normally make this a compelling read, is off stage, separated by not one but two narrative buffers. Worse, it's already taken place.

Readers have an intuitive sense where the present point in a story is located, and they're going to assume that what is going on in the present is the story proper. Everything else is back story or foreshadowing. You have undeniably imagined a whole host of grisly scenes with Myra and Mitch. Your challenge is to bring them into the same moving present that now only contains one brief appearance by the driving force behind your story. It's not a bad moment. You need many more of them.

You have a couple of options, as I see it, both involving massive rewrites. One is to keep Jake your main character, but give him an actual storyline, one that the events with Mitch impact directly. Somehow you have to involve him in Mitch's life situation, and make it more organic than mere curiosity. Right now they don't seem to be good friends. I don't know how you'd do it, but you need to create a situation that entwines Jake's fate with Mitch's. This would involve Jake in the dramatic events as a participant rather than a mere observer after the fact.

Or, you simply start from scratch and tell the story through Mitch's eyes, make him the main character.

Either way, you have to establish at the outset that Myra is a witch. You don't need to be ham-fisted about it. If Jake's your main character, you might have him pass by her house, with the occult advertisements outside on the lawn. I don't really know how best to do it, but you can't just pull rabbit out of your hat and casually tell the readers, "Oh, by the way, Myra is a real witch and she's about to unleash armageddon on everyone." They won't buy it.

I hope you do the repairs needed to this piece because I think you have a nice core to work with. It's a good story. You just need to tell it.