The time and place of this story is authentically depicted by the author.

She describes a unique period in American history. Although Mercy Short is confined to her room during her encounters with the demons, the journal provides an accurate, vivid word picture of her life and surroundings within two cultures between 1690 and 1693 in various locales in New England and Canada. Beginning with the Indian attack on the Short farmhouse in New Hampshire, the march to Quebec and her stay in the house next to the North Church in Boston, the setting becomes integral to the story. Through Mercy's writings, the author enlightens the reader with descriptions of the environment, speech, foods, clothing, religious rites, and customs of the seventeenth-century Puritans and Algonquin Indians. She always remains true to the era for these two diverse groups, detailing such specifics as the using of a colash, a low-wheeled carriage...