Witches of Devon

About the Book

An exorcism at a Washington celebrity fundraiser. A troupe of Transylvanian vintage-plane pilots discover a mysterious trove of Hapsburg gold in an unlikely American location. A disastrous experiment with an endangered species of bat. The revenge of a militarized herd of wild pigs in the mountains of California. These are some of the many tales in Witches of Devon: Tales of the Humorous and Strange. First appearing in such magazines as The Missouri Review, Karamu, Cimarron Review, and Beyond Baroque, these nine mystery tinged short stories explore the comically bizarre and surreal through characters and conflicts tied to a strange or uncanny event that lies at the heart of the story. Witches of Devon was written to make people think as well as smile. Several stories satirize current environmental politics, while the title story is a fictional exploration of the now-discredited spate of child sexual abuse accusations that rocked day care centers during the early 1990s.

Acts of God is a story about Tufts, a feisty news editor who pursues the reporting of a disastrous endangered-species experiment involving an arrogant bureaucrat, Creeder. A weird group of vampire-lore ultralight pilots is attracted to the crisis of an out-of-control colony of Kanawha bats clandestinely imported into old coast artillery caverns on lower Chesapeake Bay. This story was a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Sepulcher by the Sea is a tale set in a water-moat surrounded seacoast fort still inhabited by the spirit of one-time resident Edgar Allan Poe. An operations-research perfectionist, Deems, faces mounting frustrations arising from the fort's hard-to-maintain parapets, its slothful team of "mowing engineers," pastel-clad tourist hordes, and unregulated dogs--frustrations that join to produce an explosive conclusion.

Waters of the Firmament is about a curmudgeonly newspaper journalist, Burr, and his 12-year-old artist son in a Chesapeake town, told against the backdrop of sharply conflicting visions of environmental wetlands. The story satirizes an eco-extremist spokesman and his strange wife in scenes including a humorous "Planet Day" dress-up event and the painting of a sunset in which nature's sovereignty and transcending beauty overtake ideology.

The Exorcism at Hollywood East takes place in the Washington Georgetown palace of a famous novelist of exorcism. At an "anti-nuke" fundraiser, an unexpected event occurs involving an activist bishop; a crusading, politically naive actress; and an orgy of Hollywood and political celebrity self-display. This story, seen through the eyes of Degler, a campaign operative, is a satire of political correctness in the late Cold War period.

Witches of Devon, told by a young reporter, is a story about a modern-day Freudian obsessed child-abuse witchhunt in a bucolic small town on the Carolina Albemarle. Repeated in this tale of Jennifer Trolley and innocence-guilt reversal is the natural, or supernatural, recurrence of a strange event on the very site of a reported warlock appearance 300 years earlier.

Creatures is a short fictional moment in an unusual netherland of office incompetence and tension in which a lone human, Damon, survives in a rodent world.

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