Black Light

Author’s Note

IN THE COURSE OF writing this novel, I referred to the research of many people, including the classic texts on Dionysos, Dionysus: Myth and Cult by Walter Otto and Carl Kerényi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life; as well as scholarly work in mythology and folklore by Alain Daniélou, A.G. Ward, Eleanor Hull, E.O. James, Walter Burkert, Catherine Johns, Donald A. Mackenzie, J.D.S. Pendlebury, Arthur Evans, Walter Torbrügge, Ivar Lissner, Claude Levi-Strauss, and the redoubtable Jane Harrison. Most of all, I am indebted to the work of the Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg, whose books The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, first introduced me to the Benandanti and Malandanti. Any factual errors are, of course, my own.

The trial of Giulietta is adapted from the late sixteenth-century trials of Paolo Gasparutto and Battista Moduco, as recorded in The Night Battles and translated by John and Anne Tedeschi.

Some of the history of Kamensic Village was based on God’s Country: A History of Pound Ridge, New York, by Jay Harris, as well as material compiled and published by the Pound Ridge Historical Society and safely kept for lo! these many years, by my parents. Thanks, Mom and Dad. I drew as well on the memories of my friends Kathleen Hart, especially her poems about Whitlockville, the drowned village beneath the Mianus reservoir; and Anne Wittman, who twenty years ago worked with me at the Bedford Village Courthouse Museum (open weekends, Closed Today). However, anyone looking for the boundaries of Kamensic should keep in mind Melville’s warning: “It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

My heartfelt thanks to the usual suspects: Martha Millard, Caitlin Blasdell, Jim Rickard, Paul Witcover, Christopher Schelling, Richard Grant, and especially John Clute.