[Arthur Dimmesdale is] Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter revisited—to no apparent purpose. Dimmesdale, you'll remember, is the Puritan minister tortured by his association with the sin for which Hester Prynne wears the scarlet letter "A" on her breast. Larson's Dimmesdale, however, is an explicit adulterer who gets Hester with child and damns both; his suffering afterwards is mental (a Puritan conscience and hell-fire fear inflamed beyond balm) and physical (stigmata—an "A", naturally—that appears on the skin of his chest). Indeed, Dimmesdale appears about to be consumed alive with guilt when Roger Chillingworth intervenes, offering Indian shaman cures and hypnosis. And the ordeal ends only when Hester, in secret forest meetings, reveals to Dimmesdale that she'd actually been married (chastely) to Chillingworth in England—where he was a magician, an evil shaman who is now devilishly bent upon prompting Dimmesdale's destruction under the guise of ministering to him...