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THE HAITIAN ZOMBIE SECRET

Name: THE HAITIAN ZOMBIE SECRET
Author: Reynold Ducasse
ISBN: 978-1-4196-8591-0

by Reynold Ducasse ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

As an essay, informative; as a novel, occasionally entertaining.

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An impassioned case against the Haitian folk belief in zombies and voodoo, inspired by a true story.

In late 1989, local authorities of Roche-Ã-Bateau, Haiti, arrested Belavoix Doricent, a destitute local man, for the murder of his nephew Wilfrid Doricent. Belavoix's trial would become a singular case in the annals of 20th-century jurisprudence–in Haiti or anywhere else. For the chief witness for the prosecution was none other than the victim himself, Wilfrid. The state argued that the uncommunicative, blank-faced man standing in the courtroom had been positively identified by his parents as their long-dead son, turned into a zombie by his malevolent uncle Belavoix. The actual historical trial itself was rather dull–an open-and-shut case in which neither judge nor jury questioned the state's presumption of guilt. So author Ducasse, a native Haitian and a medical doctor, gives readers a fictionalized account of the trial as he believes it ought to have proceeded. Using scientific facts and investigative logic as his guides, Belavoix's hypothetical defense attorney attacks the very heart of traditional Haitian belief in voodoo and zombies. Even today, many educated Haitians accept as fact that hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of zombies roam the countryside or work as mindless plantation laborers. Ducasse outlines the origins of zombie beliefs in African mythology and the historical legacy of slavery, explaining the corrosive effect of the belief in fantasy on Haiti's economy and politics. The fictionalized elements of this novel soon give way to the author's ruminations on the meaning of zombie mythology in modern-day Haiti, such that by the end, the book becomes more of a nonfiction treatise than a novel. Nonetheless, readers interested in an unsentimental take on Haitian culture will find these reflections intermittently fascinating.

As an essay, informative; as a novel, occasionally entertaining.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-4196-8591-0

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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BUNNY

by Mona Awad ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...

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A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.

Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.

Pub Date: June 11, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-525-55973-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by Mona Awad

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by Mona Awad

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by Mona Awad

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THE BLUEST EYE

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 29, 1970

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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.