It turns out that a pervasive love of Stranger Things, some rudimentary research skills, and an enduring passion for truth and enlightenment is the perfect recipe for a book addressing a topic that is compelling, if not controversial and formidable in scope: the devil, the trope of Satanism, the sordid history of witches, and the oft-overlooked period of American history called the Satanic Panic.

The Devil We Don’t Know started out as a lingering interest inspired by season 4 of Stranger Things to better understand Satanic Panic and how it emerged in public consciousness during the 1970s and 1980s in America. What I didn’t know is that ideas about the looming threat of devil worship and Satanic cults was inspired by a much older paranoia around witches, dubbed the pinnacle servants of Satan, later morphing into a collective panic around subculture that included interest in the occult, magic, rock ‘n roll, and even tabletop games. This sordid tale begins all the way in the earliest centuries in Europe, where the menace of witches led to thousands being executed by burning or hanging, crosses the ocean into the early colonies in America, famously dubbed the Salem witch trials, and evolved into a collective panic around Satanic cults reportedly sacrificing children, with the ultimate goal of completely undoing Christianity in America.

The truth about Satanic Panic is that it was a hoax, generated by characters including a paranoid schizophrenic, corrupt politicians, and social workers and psychologists who accidentally stumbled on a monumental cash cow, exploiting ignorant people to make a quick buck and get their face on TV. Ideas that percolated in the American consciousness about Satan were the products of the media, starved for bleeding headlines, and fraudsters who found a financial incentive to prey on the uninformed public. This, in a crooked effort to reestablish the status quo of traditional family values, thought to be disintegrating under the pervasive influence of the emerging counterculture, all under the umbrella of devilish propensities.

In this volume, you’ll find everything from Stranger Things to Romantic writers in Europe, witches to suburban soccer moms, melodramatic TV personalities to the founding fathers, and myths and legends to irrefutable truth. Always informative, often witty and thought-provoking, The Devil We Don’t Know sheds light on hundreds of years of misinformation, and how we can do better.