Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
As the descendent of Martha Carrier, an accused woman executed at Salem, Alice Markham-Cantor presents a riveting story that spans centuries and brings the historical significance of the witch trials into modern times.
Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, this book illuminates a shocking truth: contrary to popular opinion, the witch hunts never ended. Alice shares research that suggests tens of thousands of witch hunt-related deaths have happened all over the world in the last thirty years. The Once & Future Witch Hunt also features tantalizing glimpses into Alice's ancestors' lives and reimagines the trials through fact-based fiction.
At the intersection of witchcraft, feminism, anthropology, and history, this book gives us as authentic a retelling as may ever be possible while trying to answer that single, irrepressible question: how could this have happened?
Synopsis
Past and present collide in this page-turner investigation into Salem's irrepressible question: How could this have happened?
In 1692, Martha Allen Carrier was hanged in the Salem witch trials as the "Queen of Hell." Three hundred years later, her nine-times-great-granddaughter, Alice Markham-Cantor, set out to discover why Martha had died. As she chased her ancestor through the archives, graveyards, and haunted places of New England, grappling with what we owe the past, Alice discovered a shocking truth: witch hunts didn't end in Salem.
Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and non-fiction chapters, The Once & Future Witch Hunt does not treat Salem as a cautionary tale. It treats Salem as an instruction manual--not on how to perform witch hunts, but how to stop them.
Foreword by Rebecca Traister, New York Times bestselling author.
Afterword by Silvia Federici, author of Caliban and the Witch.