CREATURES OF PASSAGE

In which late-1970s Washington, D.C., is reimagined as an enchanted land populated by changelings, phantoms, seers, waking nightmares, and at least one haunted car.

Yejidé follows up her debut, Time of the Locust (2014), with a deeper, broader, and more audacious immersion in magical realism. It is set in 1977, and the District of Columbia is here labeled "the capital" and is surrounded by the Kingdoms of Maryland and Virginia, which are in turn parts of the “united territories” presided over by a succession of elected kings. In the city’s Anacostia section, “an isle of blood and desire…where all things lived and died on the edges of time and space and meaning,” Nephthys Kinwell operates a kind of supernatural jitney service, showing up, at times unbidden, in her rickety Plymouth Belvedere to take the community’s lonely, wayward, or forsaken wherever they want to go. Even through the car’s rattling, her passengers can hear the ghost of a White woman tapping or shifting around in the trunk. But apparently everybody living in this alternate universe is accustomed to dead people hanging around the neighborhood. Among the more restless of those spirits is Osiris, Nephthys’ twin brother, pursuing revenge on the White racists who murdered him and dumped his body in the Anacostia River. He's worried about his daughter, Amber, who's visited by dreams of the near future and regularly submits her obliquely worded prophecies to the local Black newspaper. Meanwhile, Amber’s young son, Dash, is also seeing things: a “make-believe man" by the river and, worse, a not-so-make-believe act of molestation he witnessed by accident in a school utility closet; he’s sure he’s spoken to the former while he’s still not certain he saw the latter. But the molester, whose name is Mercy, is certain he saw Dash see him. Before long, both mystic visions and real-life horrors converge into a sequence of disquieting revelations from the past and alarming prospects for calamity in the future unless Nephthys and her own spiritual powers can set in motion the hard, necessary work of placating the dead and rescuing the living.

Historic detail and mythic folklore forge a scary, thrilling vision of life along America's margins.