I was reading *Lois the Witch* by Elizabeth Gaskell. In this story, about the witch-hunts in early colonial America, the main antagonists are the hysterical settlers.
The backdrop was also very threatening, though, in an interesting way that I’d like to see more of.
The settlers were barely scraping by, and the locals were hostile to them(fair enough!). So the environment or scarcity might kill the settlers, and when they venture out of their fortified town, the Native Americans might kill them as well. The situation created isolation, a sort of claustrophobic, bleak setting, where messages between settlements might not get through, and help will never arrive.
Does anyone know of such a book?
by DoubleDragonsAllDown