This comprehensive comparative approach to the folklore, fantasy, and horror literature of New England stretches from the earliest European exploration to Stephen King, John Updike, and Shirley Jackson. Along the way it examines the Puritan witch trials as examined by Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, H.P. Lovecraft, and others; folk tales of the Windham Frogs and ghost ships; Hawthorne in Salem, Poe in Providence; the flowering of spiritualism and mysticism from 1848-1900; the New England Vampire Belief in reality and fiction from Mary Wilkins Freeman and H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King; to the...