Imagine a now vanished colonial village called Westfall, near Salem, Mass., where it is cocky, blustery boys rather than high-strung girls who raise the specter of witchcraft, rousing a self-righteous populace (and a self-interested preacher) to the hysterical hanging of a crusty, slightly addled, old recluse whose crime was inventing a dead wife and children in his loneliness and marking their ""graves"" with crosses. Fisher tells it as it might have happened, in an almost surrealistically heightened atmosphere of oppression and terror. Striking and evocative.