Review: "The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane"

By Paul Carrier

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a 2009 novel by Katherine Howe, opens in 1991. We find ourselves at Harvard University, where graduate student Connie Goodwin is nervously trying to convince a panel of historians to admit her to the university’s doctoral program, where she hopes to  pursue her interest in the colonial period.

Only later does the reader (but not Connie) travel back to 1692 and the Salem witch trials, as the plot skips back and forth between the late 20th century and early America.

Connie wins the committee’s blessing to begin her research. But it quickly becomes apparent that placating a few academics to get a foot in the door is easy compared to the multiple complications and mysterious occurrences to come.

While cleaning out her late grandmother’s old, long-vacant house nestled in the woods of Marblehead, Mass., Connie discovers an ancient key tucked into a Bible. The key has a hollow stem, from which Connie extracts a scrap of paper bearing the words “Deliverance Dane.” Assuming it might be a Puritan name from the colonial era, Connie searches in vain for a reference to Deliverance Dane in listings of local births, marriages and deaths.

When she shifts her focus to a volume identifying Puritan worshippers in nearby Salem, including excommunicated Puritans, the search bears fruit. A list of people kicked out of the church by the Puritans includes a Deliverance Dane, who was excommunicated in 1692, the year the witch trials began. Connie is intrigued by this discovery because the Puritans routinely excommunicated people after they were convicted of witchcraft.

Turning her attention to probate records, Connie learns that Deliverance’s daughter, Mercy, inherited a collection of “receipts” from her mother. Receipt can be a synonym for recipe, which sets Connie to wondering. The probate inventory lumped the receipts in with a Bible, suggesting that the receipts were compiled in book form. Did Mercy acquire an innocuous collection of 17th-century cures and treatments for aches, pains and illnesses? Or was the book something more powerful? Even, perhaps, otherworldly?

Connie is desperate to find Deliverance’s book, if it still exists, because a collection of ancient remedies (or incantations) would be a unique primary source of information about life in late 17th-century New England, virtually guaranteeing her quest for a doctorate.

But obstacles abound. Connie’s mercurial faculty advisor at Harvard is becoming increasingly impatient, even threatening, because Connie’s search seems to be going nowhere. To make matters worse, someone burns a baffling symbol into the front door of Connie’s grandmother’s house. The police suspect simple vandalism, but Connie isn’t so sure. 

Then things take a truly supernatural turn.

Howe tells an electrifying tale that convincingly conveys the hysteria and horrors of the Salem trials while also examining witchcraft from more than one perspective.

The witches of folklore (and in the fevered imaginations of 17th-century Salem residents) are malignant creatures doing the devil’s bidding with the aid of imps and familiars. But what if witches were (are?) benevolent people (no pointy hats or flying brooms) possessing esoteric knowledge and unusual powers that they used (and possibly use in our time) for good?

Howe has genealogical ties to two women accused of witchcraft in Salem (only one of whom survived). Her protagonist in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane spends an inordinate amount of time researching Deliverance, but that has the advantage of building suspense. Perhaps that’s why the novel is primarily set in 1991 rather than more recently. Historical records were not as thoroughly computerized then, and research required patience-trying  “old school” techniques.