Tooth of the Covenant

Nathaniel Hawthorne pens a new tale to exact revenge on his ancestor, a notorious judge of the Salem witch trials

Best known for his novel The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was burdened by familial shame, which began with his great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, the infamously unrepentant Salem witch trial judge. In this, the eighth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, we witness Hawthorne writing a tale entitled Tooth of the Covenant, in which he sends his fictional surrogate, Isaac Page, back to the year 1692 to save Bridget Bishop, the first person executed for witchcraft, and rescue the other victims from execution. But when Page puts on Hathorne’s spectacles, his worldview is transformed and he loses his resolve. As he battles his conscience, he finds that it is his own life hanging in the balance.

An ingenious and profound investigation into the very notion of universal truth and morality, Tooth of the Covenant probes storytelling’s depths to raise history’s dead and assuage the persistent ghost of guilt.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage and radio plays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and has been longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. He has also received writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.