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If there’s a straight and narrow route and all the rest is heathen mischief, Joel King, a Baptist minister involved in a sex scandal with a teenaged girl, hasn’t a prayer of reaching the Pearly Gates.

Fans of The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living, Martin Clark’s debut, will find his rollicking second novel, Plain Heathen Mischief, similarly escapist. It’s filled with energy runaway sentences and near-Dickensian characters. One is a suave Las Vegas lawyer called Sa’ad X who has a massive mahogany desk and a seven-foot-tall stuffed bear and other assorted animals in his office. Another is a classically evil probation officer who expects bribes. Then there’s Edmund, a dishonest former parishioner with a wooden leg who’s out to settle a score with all insurance companies, and Sophie, Joel’s loyal sister, a single mother who was dumped by her spouse. The teenager that Joel is supposed to have seduced is Christy, a super-bright, super-spoiled, drug-taking, sex-crazed “child” whose parents sent her to Roanoke Baptist for counseling. Somehow, Clark makes Christy appealing, while raising doubts as to what really happened. Joel strayed, but how far? Did he tell the truth when he confessed? And what are his just desserts? It’s interesting to note that the author himself is a Virginia circuit court judge, in the business of passing judgment.

After six dreary months in a Virginia jail, Joel, cast out by his wife, moves to Missoula, Montana, and lives in his sister Sophie’s basement a situation that at his lowest point finds him broke and lapping food off the floor like a dog. Soon after that incident, he finally agrees to join Edmund and Sa’ad in defrauding an insurance company. That way he’ll have money to give to Sophie who, it turns out, doesn’t want it.

Toward the end, the plot takes some unexpected turns, and goodness is rewarded. The surprise resolution to Joel’s spiritual and financial struggles finds the former minister far wiser than when he dispensed advice from the pulpit. Anne Morris is a reviewer in Austin, Texas.

Philip Larkin, in a rather scandalous poem from the ’70s, alleged that parents “fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” So it is with David Burkett, the protagonist in Jim Harrison’s dark and emotive eighth novel, True North. He inherited his father’s outsized appetite for women and alcohol, his mother’s melodramatic flair, and his “extra” is an almost desperate need to explain, if not redress, his family’s misdeeds. David’s ancestors immigrated to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the late 19th century and became either timber barons or predatory brutes, depending on one’s point of view. The consequences of their voracious logging (much of it on land they had no right to) are still much in evidence, both emotionally and physically. David’s father has fallen into the classic model of the third-generation rich (in which the first generation creates wealth, the second expands it, and the third squanders it). The elder Burkett, whom his son views as evil incarnate, comes across as a degenerate tornado, whose lack of scruples inflicts disaster on all in his path. In response, David begins his redemptive odyssey by writing his family history in an attempt to air out a skeleton-filled closet. As he gathers background for his exposŽ, he treks through the rough-hewn areas where his forebears made their fortune. Harrison an acclaimed poet, fiction writer (Legends of the Fall) and memoirist is at his best describing the simple pleasures of camping and fishing. You can almost smell the savory smokiness of fresh-fried trout and feel the itch left by mosquitoes the size of small aircraft. He also has a keen memory for the complex and contradictory feelings young men have for young women as they pass from adolescence into maturity. Midpoint in True North, Burkett’s editor and occasional lover challenges him to “Pretend you’re on your deathbed . . . and tell me the truth.” Harrison does just that, as his brawny prose cuts to the heart with clear-eyed insight into the prickly process of creating one’s self. Thane Tierney is a record company executive in Los Angeles.

Some novels weave their spell on the reader slowly, their incantatory prose administered drop-by-drop, page after leisurely page. Often, such books are written by women and concerned with the unique intelligence of women—which can become a predicament in a man’s world. Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell come to mind. Sylvia Townsend Warner and Marge Piercy practiced the craft in the 20th century. These cunning women of fiction—and their unforgettable company of heroines—can now welcome a new voice to their choir, Katherine Howe, whose questing character Connie Goodwin must find her arduous way into the heart of women’s ways of knowing.

Even the novel’s title, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, requires more time to pronounce, and chapters go by before its meanings unfold. A Harvard doctoral candidate, Connie learns that “Physick” is the 17th-century word for an herbal remedy, and that Deliverance Dane was a Massachusetts woman who knew this medicinal craft and kept her recipes—which she called receipts—in an almanac. Connie must discover the hidden location of this old volume of spells (there’s no better word for what they are), but she discovers so much more along the way: great personal danger, unanticipated self-knowledge and love, in both its natural and preternatural aspects.

The Salem witch trials of 1692 epitomize a moment when a society felt threatened by the notion of women’s uncanny power. At strategic points in the novel, Howe recreates, with harrowing vividness, intimate scenes from that historical crisis. The cunning woman Deliverance Dane stands heroically on trial against the madness of her Salem community. Her ordeal is all the more tragic because she embodies a simple but staggering question that Howe dares to ask of that dark history: what if witchcraft were real, but completely misapprehended by its accusers?

The novel raises another question, which may not have been intended by the author but feels just as compelling: what if Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone were told from the point of view of Hermione Granger, who attends Harvard instead of Hogwarts? Buy Katherine Howe’s beautiful novel to try out this literary recipe.

Michael Alec Rose is a composer who teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.