But beginning in the 1980s, the rising chorus of panicky Christian crazy talk had not just the rhyming whiff of Salem in 1692 but something like its actual horrible effect. Legitimate concern over the sexual abuse of children spun off a new, almost entirely fictional subgenre. The idea that satanic cults were systematically and commonly subjecting American children to nightmarish abuse—by the thousands, by the tens or hundreds of thousands—was more or less invented by a young woman just across Puget Sound from Seattle.
