Robin Cook | Musings of the Monster Librarian

“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch”? That’s the first question Dorothy is asked when she arrives in Oz. Kind of a bewildering question even if you haven’t just had your house blown into a magical country by a tornado and recovered from a bang on the head. Of course, the answer to that question is decided pretty quickly, since her house has squashed the Wicked Witch of the East. But that’s the way decisions seem to be made when it comes to judging who’s a witch and who is not. Lucky Dorothy managed to gain the support of the people of Oz, but that pendulum usually seems to swing in the opposite direction. And in America, the most notorious example, although not the only one, happened in Salem, Massachusetts.

Even children know the story of the Salem Witch Trials, and if they don’t, they really should. Any community can be shaken up by mass hysteria, the source of the horrific events that took place in this quiet New England town, and with the presence of social media in our midst, it can spread faster and further than ever before. Witch hunts are certainly no longer just the province of the superstitious. For a really excellent, accessible, and gorgeously illustrated historical account of the Salem Witch Trials, I recommend seeking out Rosalyn Schanzer’s Witches! The Absolutely True Story of the Disaster in Salem. While the target audience is really older children and young adults, this is a great choice for general readers of any age. A great follow-up title is the Newbery winner The Witch of Blackbird Pond. That award is an award for excellence: don’t let the fact that it’s an award for children’s literature stop you from reading it (Kit, the protagonist, is sixteen). While it’s set in Connecticut in the early 1600’s, it does a great job of bringing home how personal and irrational these persecutions could be. It’s a memorable title you won’t be sorry you’ve read.

It’s hard to talk about Salem without bringing up Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. This is probably the first play I ever saw (my aunt was in it, in the dancing scene at the beginning). While it’s short, it surely makes an impact (it has been made into an opera, and may be the shortest opera I have ever seen). The play brings to life the Salem Witch Trials and the hysteria that accompanied them. The Crucible, written in the 1950s during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare”, is, under its surface, a rather pointed allegory about the “witch hunts” against supposed Communists that occurred during that time. Miller demonstrated exactly what I wrote about above: that incitement to mass hysteria is no longer limited to the superstitious, and any of us can become a target at any time. There’s an excellent movie adaptation of The Crucible, with Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, as well. It’s frequently used in American Literature classes to engage students’ interest in the play, which is generally required reading for those classes (Want to give required reading pizzazz? Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder can do that). I haven’t seen this next movie, but The Salem Witch Trials, originally a miniseries on CBS, and starring Kirstie Alley and several other notable actresses, is supposed to be a very good fictionalized version of the events of that time.

Authors have taken varied approaches to the events of the Salem Witch Trials and to witch hunts in general. One surprise is Robin Cook’s medical thriller Acceptable Risk, which involves a subplot with one of the main characters discovering she is related to a Salem witch. I don’t know that you can say that Robin Cook is actually a good writer, but he is a compelling and memorable one– books of his that I read in high school still stick with me. I constantly hear complaints from my dad that there are no good medical thrillers out there anymore, so why not take this chance to resurrect what is admittedly a rather elderly title?

More recently, Alexandra Sokoloff produced Book of Shadows, a supernatural thriller/police procedural that involves a contemporary witch living in Salem, who gets involved in helping a police detective solve the mystery of the murder of a college student that appears to have Satanic overtones. While not directly tied to the original trials, I happen to enjoy Sokoloff’s books, and many readers who normally skip over witch-themed horror may find themselves drawn in to this. And within just the past few months, the last book in Melissa de la Cruz’s trilogy Witches of East End, Winds of Salem, was released. While the image above is of the first book in the series, the second, Serpent’s Kiss, and the third, Winds of Salem, have a strong thread involving the Salem Witch Trials. With Witches of East End just coming out as a television series, including these books in a display on the Salem Witch Trials is a great way to draw readers in to a witchy world as Halloween approaches. These books are more urban fantasy than horror, but paranormal lovers will get right into them.

Witch hunts haven’t been limited to Salem and its environs, though. Witch Hunts: A Graphic History of the Burning Times, a non-fiction graphic novel by Rocky Wood and Lisa Morton, with shocking and effective artwork by Greg Chapman, also details witch hunts in Europe, from the time of the Black Death through the Reformation and finally to the Enlightenment. With torture and burning witches alive being methods often used by witch hunters, you can imagine what the artwork must be like. The book, written by Lisa Morton and Rocky Wood, noted scholars in horror non-fiction, treats its topic respectfully and seriously, and won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award for Best Graphic Novel.

The movie Season of the Witch does not pretend to be a serious, non-fictional account of the Burning Times in Europe. It does take place in Europe, during the Middle Ages, at a time when accusations of witchcraft were very serious. Two former knights, played by Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, are assigned to escort a young woman to an abbey to face accusations of witchcraft. It’s not a great movie, but it’s entertaining, and keeps you guessing as to whether the woman the two men are escorting actually is a witch.

There are a lot of other books, movies, and other materials on witches out there, so maybe I’ll come back to the topic again, but I think this is a good collection to get those interested in Salem, witch hunts, and witchery in general, started on that TBR pile.

An article in The Guardian suggested that the absence of the supernatural monster from books generally considered horror fiction could be the end of the genre. I must respectfully disagree. While Becky Siegel Spratford, considered the expert on reader’s advisory in horror fiction, suggests that supernatural forces must be present for a book to be considered part of the horror genre, here at MonsterLibrarian we have always taken a broader view of what constitutes horror fiction (some would argue, I’m sure, that our definition is too broad). In fact, when we started out, with a much smaller number of genre divisions, one of the categories we had was “science gone awry”. It can be as terrifying as any supernatural creature, that’s for sure. We’ve since integrated the titles from that category into other subgenres, because it’s now such a common source of monstrosity. I confess that the books I remember as most terrifying from my own teenage years included not just Stephen King’s early works, but science fiction stories such as Asimov’s “Nightfall”, and medical thrillers, like Robin Cook’s Godplayer and Mutation. The natural world at its most frightening, and the dangerous obsessions of the mad scientist intent on altering, extending, or creating life–these are the stuff of terror, fear, and dread. And they have been for ages.

The advancement of science and the expansion of our world have changed us, and the source of our fears is now much more often the evil we do to each other and to the world around us, and how it rebounds to us. That’s not to say that we have abandoned our fears of attack from outside or supernatural forces, but mad science is hardly new to the horror genre. Critique of social, economic, and political issues isn’t new to the genre either, and the existence of that critique in a text doesn’t determine whether it’s horror–the emotional punch to the gut does that. Horror does not have to be, as the author of the Guardian’s article suggests, drawn from ancient fears and folktales, or from gothic novels. If it’s not somehow situated in the real, or at least the believable, then the fantastical elements are unlikely to succeed. In spite of the occasional moaning and groaning that horror is dead, it’s not. Like so many of the iconic monsters of the genre, as long as there are things to fear, it will rise. And, to answer the question the author poses of where we will find books that really scare us now… well, in a genre as broad as horror, there is a place for everyone to get their literary chills. And if you’d like some recommendations, we at MonsterLibrarian.com are happy to oblige.