The fathomless trees, the hurrying man and the dread of wolves are real. It feels like the edge of the world, and to those who have settled here it is. … The air is ice-sharp, tinged with smoke and resin, the only sounds the rush of water, the muffled bellows of cattle and the distant cry of a wolf. A man is hurrying home along the main street, to his left a trickling brook and a fathomless bank of trees. Time has erased its every trace, but we can imagine it, quiet and still, settled under a pall of late winter darkness. Once, beside a great river at the edge of a forest, there stood a small town. Malcolm Gaskill’s “The Ruin of All Witches” begins with the language of an ominous fairy tale: THE RUIN OF ALL WITCHES: Life and Death in the New World, by Malcolm Gaskill
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