Book Rec - More Weight by Ben Wickey

It's October, and so it is the spooky season, which is the best season. My daughter feels similarly, and she wanted to watch Hocus Pocus yesterday, so we did. I haven't seen that movie since I was a child, but I remember being enthralled by the whole thing, and by the idea of Salem.

And I thought of this book - More Weight, by Ben Wickey, which is one of my favourite books I have read in the last year.

As an adult, I've been to Salem once. Driving through for book events a long time ago, we made a detour, frankly, out of curiosity. There are few places that occupy the collective imagination the way Salem does. But I found that I went there interested in the idea of Salem, and then, there is something much different about visiting the place that is Salem. Which brings me to Ben's book.

Sometimes I am given books and asked to blurb them. In this case, I wrote to Ben and offered a blurb because of how much I liked it. This is what I wrote:

More Weight is the kind of book I always hope will fall into my hands, but rarely materializes. I have not been so enthralled by a comic for a long time. Ben Wickey’s cartooning is a masterwork, the style shifts and reconstructs as we go on, his characters are lit from within with true emotion. He deftly brings you face to face with 1692. This is a work that satisfies, as the telling of a story, as an understanding of that story in our culture, and as the reckoning of a descendant who lives with that history in his very bones. The Salem Witch Trials are not just a historical event, they are an anguished insight into a foundational American soul that we constantly look back to without being able to change either the outcome or who we are. But it is Wickey’s desire to tell the story both as meticulously as it happened then, and as confounding as it lives among us now, that sets More Weight apart. In a story so often misremembered, but here, no fact is taken for granted, no stone is left unturned. It is an archaeological excavation of a book, in the greatest sense, because we naturally want answers to the unfathomable, but sometimes all we can do is carefully scrape away time bit by bit, and get as close as we can.

I left Salem with complicated feelings I found hard to describe, and, I think More Weight addresses them. Ben Wickey grew up in the area, and so, he has a lifetime of having to think about it under his belt, and it shows. It isn't one story, it is many stories. But it does centre around the stories of Giles and Martha Corey. The cartooning is exquisite. Here is the sequence for the trial and execution of Bridget Bishop:

In between, there are sequences of an entirely different style, with three timelines. The 1600s, the present with its commercialized distortions and jarring juxtapositions, and a shifting, dreamlike conversation between Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who grapple with the weight of history itself.

I hope Ben will excuse the many pages I'm posting, it is really just to give you the scope of what this book covers - and at a little over 500 pages, it is a lot. There are, by my count, 56 pages of meticulously researched endnotes at the back of the book. (Side note, I read a few goodreads reviews that said things like it was all too much and graphic novels shouldn't have too many reading sections but I think my audience here will largely agree that showing that amount of research is like the icing on the cake. I'll take this opportunity to say there is no such thing as the way a graphic novel "should be." It should be anything at all, as long as it is a good book. The many accolades this book has received makes those comments matter little, but all the same.)

But the heart of the story here is Martha and Giles.

Giles is a painful protagonist to follow, a man full of anger, suspicion, violence, defiance and regret. A man who helped send his own wife, whom he loved, to the hanging tree, and in the end became famous for being pressed to death himself during the trials. Martha is heart rendering, a woman with a secret who is betrayed by her husband, and whose strength of character sees us through to the end. A few separate scenes:

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See how Martha, for example, physically changes from the beginning pages to those towards the end, in her suffering.

Anyway, there is a lot to take in here, and I recommend it highly.