Considered a masterpiece by critics, John Buchan’s Witch Wood combines the author’s interests in landscape, Calvinism, and the fate of Scotland after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

In seventeenth-century Scotland, religious struggles run rampant. Here, Young David Sempill, a moderate Presbyterian minister, pleas with his sect to have compassion for the remnants of King Montrose’s defeated army, who are being harried and slaughtered by religious extremists. But as pre-Christian nature worship and its accompanying black magicks seep forth from Melanudrigill Wood, Sempill himself disappears.