Schiff helps the reader understand the warped logic of the trials. Then how, Hathorne asked the woman, could she be sure she wasn't a witch herself? She jokes and raises her eyebrows at the strangest accusations ('A puritan did not waste a tragedy,' she smirks), and she can barely hide her contempt for the men who facilitated the hearings and executions, especially the severe minister Samuel Parris and the cold logician John Hathorne, who oversaw the trials and, in one case, faced down a woman who said she didn't know what a witch was. Sometimes Schiff conjures the doom-heavy atmosphere of an Ingmar Bergman film, but more often she makes her book surprisingly arch. 'The Witches' is tonally complex, novelistic in style. In this language, you can hear the voice of the book, concrete yet unsettling, like a knock on a door late at night. But Schiff doesn't throw up her hands in frustration when faced with this instead, she uses it as fodder for her book: 'Often what pinches and pricks, gnaws, claws, stabs, and suffocates, like a seventeenth-century witch, is the irritatingly unsolved puzzle in the next room,' she writes. Because of incomplete information - scant records were kept of any of the legal proceedings - we can, to a degree, only guess at answers.

The historical moment 'The Witches' attempts to elucidate is an epistemological nightmare: during a strange period in 1692, a New England town put its own citizens to death over hearsay-based accusations of witchcraft. The story of Salem seems so familiar, which is what makes it ultimately so strange.Įverybody thinks they know a little bit about the Salem witch trials, but Schiff's book demonstrates that nobody can possibly know everything. It says something about the archetypal nature of the trials - as riveting to Salem residents as reality TV is to contemporary audiences - that one of the best ways to evoke the proceedings is by referencing our shared cultural memory. Sometimes Schiff brings it up explicitly, as when she tosses off a reference to Harry Potter or when she compares certain malevolent spirits to James Bond villains.

For a book about the 1600s, Stacy Schiff's 'The Witches,' an exhaustive history of the Salem witch trials, calls to mind a surprising amount of contemporary popular culture.

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