The gothic came early. Edgar Allan Poe before anything else — the appetite for decay, perverse beauty, minds and bloodlines and houses turned inward too long. Then giallo: Italian horror with its razor logic and operatic color, violence that announces itself beautifully. Years writing supernatural horror scripts for an indie producer who was genuinely a genius — a mentor, a real artist, a good human being who had sold films and understood the form from the inside. The scripts never got made. They taught the writing. That is the better deal.
The Wicker Man arrived somewhere in there and stayed. Folk horror with real countryside, real old authority underneath the new authority, ritual that is not decorative because the landscape means it. Then college in Boston — New England winters, the weight of that particular history in the ground, friends who liked witches and understood what the Puritan colonies actually built. This series was written for them. A New Yorker looking at New England from the outside, understanding the obsession from the inside.
The witch burnings were a genuinely messed up thing. Not a metaphor, not a teachable moment — a specific historical machinery that targeted women, named them monsters, and made the community complicit in the killing. That kind of injustice wants a story where the underdogs become the heroes. Not rehabilitation, not apology — the underdog wins. That is the oldest satisfying story structure there is, and it is satisfying because it is almost never true in real life. The series was also for young women who wanted that. The fantasy of power that history had specifically and repeatedly taken away. A space where their fury was not the problem — it was the solution.
Most witch-trial fiction still wants absolution. It wants the innocent woman, the cruel town, the tragic misunderstanding, the late-arriving moral clarity. Even when the books are angry, they often keep one foot in apology. They want to indict the past without fully surrendering to the older fantasy hiding underneath it: what if the condemned were real, the power was real, and the fire came back the other way.
That is where *Rites of Flesh and Shadow*starts.
The series is set in colonial New England, which means it already arrives inside one of the ugliest little arrangements in Western history: paranoia dressed as righteousness, communal violence made theatrical, male panic given scripture and procedure. The useful twist is not cosmetic. The accused are not symbols for helpless purity. They are witches. They do not need vindication from the people trying to kill them. They need time, ritual, hunger, and the right weather.
That difference changes the moral temperature immediately. These books are not interested in whether the oppressors deserve mercy. They are interested in what revenge looks like when persecution has finally created something worthy of its own fear.
The series understands that folk horror works best when the landscape is already older than the institution trying to govern it. Puritan authority stands on top of something it does not understand and cannot digest. Forests keep older loyalties. Stone circles keep their own memory. The sea has no interest in Christian order. By the time the magistrates and judges realize they have misread the world, they are already late.
What makes the books more satisfying than standard revenge-fantasy is that the magic is not airy or decorative. It has texture. Flesh, blood, rot, books, winter, corpses, paint, ink, fever, ritual materials that feel chosen rather than randomly gothic. The body is not an abstract container for power here. It is the surface the power uses. That gives the series a kind of physical confidence a lot of dark fantasy lacks. The spells do not merely happen. They are incurred.
That also lets the books steal something useful from Poe without becoming a costume party. The influence is there in the appetite for decay, the pleasure in perverse beauty, the fascination with minds, houses, and bloodlines that have turned inward on themselves too long. But the series is stronger where it mixes that gothic intensity with rural dread and communal spectacle. The town does not just fear the witch. It participates in the production of the witch. It builds the occasion. It supplies the audience. Then, when the answer comes back in a language older and uglier than its own, it calls the response monstrous as if it had not written the invitation itself.
That is one of the things the books get very right. The revenge is not random. It has accounting in it.
