There are witches in a little backwater suburban town in Rhode Island and they are women whose husbands have divorced them. Three witches, of course. Discovered their powers upon leaving their husbands/their husbands leaving them. Sleeping with random men in the town - mainly married men who are bored with their wives. Struggling to earn a living (only divorced women work). Looking for the next love affair, for whatever will make their lives that little less dreary. A dark stranger moves into the empty mansion, holds sabbats, holds sexual ceremonies (or rather, gives them a place to hold their own), energises them. You can see how this is going to develop. But it's Updike and so very clever, very funny - though it sounds like it's written from a woman's perspective but (I think) with details that a man would find sexy. The reader is made complicit in the casual, spiteful, malicious magic that is practised - and there's quite a good deal of it, and all of it distinctly feminine, or at least female; the dark stranger is the least convincing main character in the book. And of course full of unattractive suburban sex.