‘The Physick Book’ delivers a spooky historical story - Entertainment, Books - Army Times

‘The Physick Book’ delivers a spooky historical story

Katherine Howe’s “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane” is a witch story that will leave you spellbound.

Surely Physick Book wins the prize for most intriguing book title — we won’t give away its meaning here — and its plot and characters are equally engaging.

Best of all, Howe’s no J.K. Rowling wannabe. The author of the Harry Potter series may have written the world’s best-selling series about wizardry, but “Physick Book” is a fresh and mesmerizing modern-day mystery of witches and witchcraft set in the real world — and that’s what makes it so good.

Howe’s perspective is equally fascinating. She’s completing a Ph.D. in American and New England studies. Two of her ancestors were accused during the Salem witch trials. Only one survived.

It is from this rich mine of historic, familial and academic detail that Howe weaves a modern story with historical flashbacks.

History tells us that Salem’s accused were, in fact, innocent, that the evidence against them was based on superstition and hysteria. Howe’s embellishment is compellingly ironic and flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

What if, in fact, witches do exist?

The novel’s witch-in-waiting is Connie Goodwin, a Harvard graduate student who is spending the summer in her grandmother’s abandoned witch-trial-era cottage in Marblehead, Mass.

Faster than a nose twitch, the novel gracefully glides from an academic mystery to supernatural thriller when Connie discovers an ancient key hidden in a musty Bible. Inside the hollow key is a scroll inscribed with “Deliverance Dane.”

Connie’s hunt for the key’s significance takes on a gothic urgency when strange things begin to happen to her and the young man she loves.

“Physick” is a bubbling cauldron of colorful plot points: a crumbling cottage, a missing spell book, a mysterious illness, a scrappy heroine and a Toto-like dog that may be more than Connie’s pet.

Once in a while, a new writer offers up a hypnotic tale of the supernatural that has the publishing world quivering with excitement. In 2005 it was Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian;” in 2006 it was Diane Setterfield’s “The Thirteenth Tale.”

This summer, “The Physick Book” is magic.