Spooky Sampling of Books

WaPo also ran blurbs on six "Halloweenish" books this morning. A nice read. Excerpt:

Most Americans know about the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692, but a more lethal outbreak of witch hysteria infected England from 1645 to 1647, during the country's devastating Civil War. It all began when Goodwife Rivet got sick and her husband blamed her mysterious affliction on the bewitchment of a one-legged octogenarian named Bess Clarke. Two "witchfinders," Matthew Hopkins and John Stearne, interrogated the widow Clarke, and she proudly confessed to "carnall copulation" with Satan. She also informed them that her pet rabbit was possessed. After seeing Clarke hanged, Hopkins and Sterne then launched a two-year campaign to eradicate witches. Often using torture, they interrogated 300 suspects, more than a hundred of whom were executed (predominantly old women, as in Salem). In Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (Harvard Univ., $29.95), historian Malcolm Gaskill chronicles this chilling tale of hysteria and scapegoating, bolstering his narrative with exhaustive research and meticulous detail.