Salem Which Trials

Salem Witch Trials Cast Spell on New Novel

Rebecca Wolff is one of the founders of the literary journal, Fence, and the author of the poetry collections, “Manderley” and “Figment.” She uses her gifts as a poet in her new novel, “The Beginners,” which will be published this week.

A meditation on a young girl’s coming of age, the book rests on Wolff’s attention to language, the narrator’s haunting voice and point-of-view, and the unfolding of the town’s darker connections to the Salem witch trials.

Speakeasy caught up with Wolff before the book’s release.

What was the seed for this novel?

The very most original seed was a drive I once took through central Massachusetts, around the Quabbin Reservoir, on my way from Amherst to Boston. Some of my ancestors had moved to that area from Salem (now called Danvers) after their matriarch, Rebecca Nurse, had been hung in the witch trials in 1693. So I was driving around looking for graveyards, and when I found one I would look for headstones with the family name (I found a few). I was also driving through towns, small, isolated towns that to my eyes (those of a New Yorker) appeared inexplicable: Who in the world could be from here, and of what might their lives consist. This was an outsider’s awe of the inside, but eventually these turns of mind reversed and I wondered: Why, or how, on earth could anyone ever choose to move here? And at that point I began devising a story.

Your descriptions of the town of Wick are at once literal and fantastical. Did you borrow details from any of the actual towns involved in the Salem witch trials?

Wick is quite closely based on several small villages, even hamlets, that are nestled along the east side of the Quabbin Reservoir. I amalgamated them into one town, and borrowed the entirely factual story of how next to them there had used to be a very active valley full of towns and villages before they were evacuated, razed, and flooded to create a reservoir that still supplies the water for Boston. So these towns, and the fictional town of Wick, were left behind on high ground, and therefore acquired a new isolation. I didn’t do all the research I might have done–I made day trips several times during the writing of the novel but, much like one of my main characters, Raquel, I have something of an aversion to facts and chose to invent pretty much everything but the bare bones. I hung a body on the skeleton of the family story lightly sketched above, but again like Raquel I never could bring myself to actually go to the Historical Society and sniff through records.

Salem Secrets - Witch Trials of 1692 || Square-Go.com

When I heard about the series Hidden Mysteries, I thought it would be perfect for my nephews and nieces. The kind of puzzle game is more appropriately suited to the DS and, in the case of Professor Layton for both adults and children. However, if you expected something to keep you up to the next in this series, you'll be disappointed.

The game puts you in almost a ghost town, playing music and strange cliché asking you to navigate through the village looking for clues to the disappearance of four young girls due to the affliction of witchcraft.  When you find them, you use your inventory to help them overcome their spells. 

Whilst navigating, you can hold down one of the trigger buttons to display direction arrows and points of interest, and you can use click on the inventory and drag items onto the screen to use on any objects, for example dragging matches onto an oil lamp to light it.  This style of puzzles probably should have lived and died with early 80's games; 'Take A to B to acquire C to take to D etc' is more of a chore than a puzzle.

You start off without any items in your inventory and gather them in one of two ways: by searching the village and clicking on things or by solving puzzles.  The basic search puzzles are signified by a cloud of orange gas that appear randomly throughout the game - TOO randomly.  Often you will find yourself wondering what you can do next and have to search every single screen in the game to find the next spontaneously spawned orange cloud, which means another search fest.  You will get to know the trident shaped village more intimately than John Terry knows other players' wives.

So, it would be fair to ask, most importantly, what are the puzzles like?  Well, the standard search ones give you a list of seven items to find and as you chalk off the list it adds a few more until you exhaust the supply.  The actual design here is pretty good, for example if you are searching for a star, it could be a pattern in a plate or wood, or high in the sky.  There are items that are deliberately ambiguous, such as a fan, which could be electric or paper.  However, there is nothing to stop you from tapping away at your DS screen on every possible location until you complete the task and are given another item to take somewhere.  This sometimes isn't enough though as the 'Hint' and 'Quit' buttons at the top and bottom of the screen often obscure the very items you were searching for!

The Salem witch trials, a primary source history of the witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts

The Salem witch trials, a day-by-day chronicle of a community under siege

The Salem witch trials

The Salem Witch Trials

The specter of Salem, remembering the witch trials in nineteenth-century America