A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts (2016)
Written by: J.W. Ocker
Genre: Non-fiction
Pages: 315 (Paperback)
Publisher: The Countryman Press
Why I Chose It: I wanted a book to put me in the mood for Halloween, but I primarily chose A Season with the Witch because I am completing a reading challenge that requires “a book about or set on Halloween.” Every other book I have reviewed here has been fiction, so I was also interested in reviewing a non-fiction book.
The premise:
Salem, Massachusetts, may be the strangest city on the planet. A single event in its 400 years of history—the Salem Witch Trials of 1692—transformed it into the Capital of Creepy in America. But Salem is a seasonal town—and its season happens to be Halloween. Every October, this small city of 40,000 swells to close to half a million as witches, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts (and their admirers) descend on Essex Street. For the fall of 2015, occult enthusiast and Edgar Award–winning writer J.W. Ocker moved his family of four to downtown Salem to experience firsthand a season with the witch, visiting all of its historical sites and macabre attractions. In between, he interviews its leaders and citizens, its entrepreneurs and visitors, its street performers and Wiccans, its psychics and critics, creating a picture of this unique place and the people who revel in, or merely weather, its witchiness.
Spoilers ahead.
Discussion: If you pick up A Season with the Witch in the hopes of learning more about the Salem witch trials, you will be gravely disappointed. This is definitely more of a travelogue than a history book. Sure, the trials are in there, but they share space with wax museums, a street performer called Steve the Vampire, pirates, the TV show Bewitched, and a signature drink known as the Lobstertini. As someone who has been fascinated with the witch trials since I read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in high school, I wanted a little more about the people and history surrounding the witch trials.
Ocker’s quirky sense of humor does make this book uniquely entertaining. He describes a tour guide who performs as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne as “a guy that likes to multi-purpose a mustache” (p. 4). Bizarrely, the actual site where the accused witches were hanged is behind a Walgreens. Ocker writes, “This is the execution site that is so infamous in American history. And people drive by it every day to pick up their heartburn medicine” (p.44). I was also amused by his description that ” [Rob] Zombie was the lead singer of the horror movie-inspired rock act White Zombie, and then he went solo with an even more horror movie-inspired rock act, and then he finally said, screw it, I need to direct horror movies” (p.155).
This is a book that simultaneously manages to be both too long and too short. Every single aspect of Salem life is given equal importance, leading to exciting chapters being followed by deathly dull ones. An entire chapter is devoted to the Peabody Essex Museum, an art museum that doesn’t want to capitalize on Salem’s witch history. It reminded me of going on vacation with my parents as a child and being dragged to Civil War battlefields when all I wanted to do was just get to Busch Gardens. I didn’t learn anything from the chapter on real life witches, which was more about making a living off being a witch that what it means to practice witchcraft as a religion. The chapter on witches in pop culture was interesting, but I doubt that anyone wants to know more about Salem’s maritime history. I also wished Ocker had elaborated more on the restaurant scene in Salem.
For a book about Halloween and one of the United States most famous executions, A Season with the Witch isn’t scary at all. It’s more like a textbook than a Stephen King novel. I know that non-fiction can be frightening because I am still terrified by Richard Preston’s book about the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone. I expected a least a few ghost stories but got more tales about the struggles of running a business in a seasonally-based economy.
In conclusion: A Season with the Witch wasn’t the book I thought it would be. It’s more about the city of Salem’s struggles to market itself than it is about the witch trials or Halloween. Intriguing and delightful chapters were followed by chapters that bored me to tears. However, I was impressed enough by Ocker’s thorough research and unique wit that I want to read his book Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, which garnered better reviews on Amazon and Goodreads than this book.
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