17 Oct 2012 01:47:58
Moore's debut The Drowning Pool took inspiration from the legend of a 19th-century witch to shape an alternative history of the Essex girl and a disquieting reworking of the ghost story. Witch Hunt opens with journalist Sadie Asquith landing a contract to write a book on Matthew Hopkins – the Witchfinder General, who cut a bloody swath through East Anglia during the English civil war. Reeling from the untimely death of her mother, Sadie determines to assuage her grief through work, pushing aside doubts about her publisher, a Murdochian mogul with political aspirations. But as soon as she begins retracing Hopkins's path, Sadie is assailed by disturbances – the disappearance of her father-in-law, an anonymous email correspondence, a break-in at her flat and a series of visions, seemingly of Hopkins's victims, at the sites of their murders. Moore's merging of horror, ghost story, detective fiction and psychogeography is a heady addition to Jeanette Winterson's book about the witches of Pendle and increasingly popular genre mash-ups.
