If you read one travel book this year Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads by Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton)In his 10th travel book, Theroux explores his own country for the first time, and brings that same withering grumpy gaze that once fell on the planet's more distant destinations to what he has termed the Dixie Dystopia a day's drive from his home. Racked by poverty, shack-haunted, broken, racist, it is a landscape that is also filled with the South's real heroes, the unsung labourers, social workers, pastors and poor working-class families locked in a desperate struggle for survival.The issueIt's Halloween and several of the leading British and US review supplements have featured round-ups of recent horror fiction, including Stephen King's latest, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (Scribner). Top place on my pile, though, must go to a non-fiction title, Stacy Schiff's history, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (Little, Brown). Most of us familiar with the town and date learned it from Arthur Miller's allegory on McCarthyism, The Crucible. That year, 14 women, five men and two dogs were convicted and hanged for witchcraft as the Massachusetts village was beset by an extraordinary wave of hysteria.Since then some 500 books and almost 2000 scholarly dissertations have been written on the "plague" and the executions that followed. It is a story, in other words, that's quite familiar; as one critic noted, "historians, like terriers, are diggers, but Salem offers stony soil for discovery".But Schiff is also a brilliant storyteller, and she brings more than a touch of the Gothic to this tale of Puritanical madness. Nights are "crow black, pitch-black, Bible black" and so cold that "bread froze in communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace". It didn't get much better when the weather warmed, either. "It was not a summer," she writes, "when you wanted to appear in your neighbour's dreams." Creepy.Which brings us to Alex Mar's Witches of America (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), a collection of profiles of several modern-day practitioners of the occult. It is a journey of sorts; Mar's book includes an investigation of her own "longing to be disturbed . shaken into believing", and her difficulty with witchcraft itself. What is it? Fraud? Therapy? Faith?So we have a curious jumble of a book, mixing cultural anthropology with history, comparative theology with obscure arcana. There's also an interesting spell for dealing with a love rival. (This sort of thing is not big only in Africa, it would seem.) It involves placing something representing the spell's target - a photograph, say - inside a sliced-open beef tongue, then pinning it shut with nine pins and dressing it up in alum, cloves, mustard and pepper. Then you wrap it in foil and put it in the freezer. Did it work? That would be telling.The bottom line"Give us light!" - London Fog: The Biography by Christine L Corton (Harvard University Press)..