Edward M. Erdelac's Blog, page 6

Conquer: The Unofficial Soundtrack

It occured to me that the print version of CONQUER includes the links to the Totally Unofficial Conquer Soundtrack I compiled, but not the track lists. So, if you pick up the audiobook and you want something going in the background as you listen to Denzel Andrew read, here’s the track list and the order.

In WHO THE HELL IS JOHN CONQUER:
“The stage stood empty and absurd on a Wednesday afternoon, the heavy air filled with Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic cranking out of an ugly old Wurlitzer Zodiac parked in a corner. The machine hadn’t seen a new record since Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, and as Isaac’s platter wound down, Superstition came on to prove it.”

Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic – Isaac Hayes

Superstition – Stevie Wonder

For KEEP COOL, CONQUER –
“How’d you get into vampires, Doc?” Conquer asked as the big car lurched away and they went humming into the rising sun, Gene Page on the radio.

I’m Gonna Catch You – Hues Corporation (Gene Page)

In CONQUER CRACKS HIS WHIP –
He tickled the dial and the sweet voice of Minnie Riperton came trickling out over the speakers like she was curled up on the passenger side cooing in his ear.

Inside My Love – Minnie Riperton

In CONQUER COMES CALLING –

The lights of the parked squad washed the dingy buildings hell red and Bermuda blue as the late model burgundy Cordoba pulled up behind it, wipers savagely sweeping the crystal beads from the windshield. Inside, Bobby Bland was lamenting the lack of love in the city when the driver cut the engine and the headlights winked out.

Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City – Bobby Bland

When Conquer started the car, the mood was already set, but Leon Haywood affirmed it on the way back to his pad at St. Marks Place...

I Wanna Do Something Freaky To You – Leon Haywood

In CONQUER COMES CORRECT –

Kung Fu – Curtis Mayfield

Jungle Eyes – Gene Page

Conquer switched the radio on to drown out the kid’s questions. ‘Down and Out In New York City’ was playing. Not even James Brown could make the drive to Montefiore’s emergency room feel shorter.

Down And Out In New York City – James Brown

Conquer’s Theme –

I first became aware of this song watching Netflix and Baz Luhrman’s criminally underrated The Get Down. It and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II’s performance as Cadillac are huge influences on Conquer, and directly formed the concept in my brain.

Pick up Conquer here.

https://www.amazon.com/Conquer-John-Book-1-ebook/dp/B08PYJWC4M

On Writing Zora

Two things I’ve noticed from a sampling of reviews of RAINBRINGER: ZORA NEALE HURSTON AGAINST THE LOVECRAFTIAN MYTHOS.

One is that a depressing amount of people (mainly of my hue) aren’t aware that Zora Neale Hurston was a real person. Somebody asked me about the book the other night and I had to spell her last name for them. That said, I don’t hold anybody at fault for not being familiar with her. I reprinted my rundown of her accomplishments from the introduction of the book right HERE. I actually love when people tell me they went and sought out her works Mules And Men, Tell My Horse, or Their Eyes Were Watching God based on liking my book. If RAINBRINGER can be a roadside ‘almost there’ sign pointing readers to the greater destination of Zora, I’m proud as hell to have it be that.

The other is that the subject of my ethnicity seems to come up pretty frequently. I’ve also noticed from private conversations that a lot of reviewers and readers have been reluctant to try the book out because….well, frankly, I’m a white dude writing the Queen of the Harlem Renaissance. This is a criticism I entirely understand and empathize with, which is why when I had come to the end of my Lovecraftian Zora stories and wanted to publish them, I made the decision not to seek out a publisher and put the collection out myself. I didn’t want to entertain the possibility that in sharing these stories I would be taking anybody else’s spot or telling anybody else’s story.

But I’m not gonna tell you pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

To that effect, and with an eye towards addressing that very valid concern, I am posting the afterword of RAINBRINGER here without comment…..

—————————————————————————————————-
What the hell am I doing writing about a character named Zora Neale Hurston?

When I was a kid, among my Little Golden Books was Walt Disney’s Uncle Remus, with a picture of B’rer Rabbit regarding the Tar Baby sitting on a log.

Man, this doesn’t sound like a very auspicious beginning to this afterword does it? Please bear with me.

I used to beg my mother to read it. I loved the cleverness of B’rer Rabbit, tricking B’rer Fox into tossing him into the briar patch to escape. The Tar Baby, to me, was an utterly alien thing, almost something to be feared. Entirely oil-black, dead, white eyes and stubby cork nose, draped in a scarecrow’s coat and a raggedy hat, masquerading as something alive, mocking the gregarious rabbit with its dumb stoicism. Then, when he finally, in exasperation, lays hands on it! The Tar Baby flowed and stuck, becoming a viscous, amorphous blob that actually engulfs the nonplussed protagonist. What the hell must have been going on in B’rer Rabbit’s mind when all that went down?

Jeez, am I really turning this into a Lovecraftian encounter? Eh, it’s what I do.

But this is about Miss Zora Neale.

In hindsight, the thing I loved most about the stories in that book was the cadence and rhythm of the characters’ speech. I couldn’t say now if my mom did them any justice, I know she hated doing it and made a big deal whenever I asked, preferring Scuppers The Sailor Dog, my other childhood favorite. But I loved to hear B’rer Rabbit read, and, when sitting alone reading to myself, I enjoyed breathlessly whispering his words as I leaned on the palms of my hands and pored over them over and over. I didn’t see the movie till I was out of college, and didn’t read Joel Chandler Harris’s originally collected stories till around the same time.

Of course, Harris’s stories were taken from the animal stories of African Americans he heard and remembered (the Tar Baby story itself had already been published the year he was born, in The Cherokee Advocate), then inserted into this problematic plantation framework, “to preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future.”

Oh brother. Well, let’s leave that alone for a minute, shall we?

I can’t describe why I loved these stories as a kid, but I think it was such a unique and descriptive way of speaking, it appealed to my ear, as the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare and the folksy natural speech of Larry McMurtry’s and Daniel Woodrell’s characters did later. When B’rer Fox and B’rer Bear dance around the tarred up B’rer Rabbit, they don’t merely gloat, ‘dey dance roun’ and roun,’ chuckling fit to kill.’ And when the Rabbit gets the better of them, he doesn’t throw back his head and let out a laugh that echoed through the woods, he ‘threw back his head an’ let outta laff dat echo troo de woods.’

In reading aloud, you see, the reader is forced to mimic the manner of speaking.

Years later, in college, my creative writing teacher passed around Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God. By passing it around, I mean we physically sat in a semicircle and read it out loud.

I relished the sound and the texture of Zora’s authentic language, the sweet succulence of her vivid metaphors. She could put an image in your mind by describing something you would have thought was unrelated. It was alive and sexy, like biting into one of the grapefruits in Janie’s hip pockets. Maybe something deep in me recalled the joy I got as a kid from listening to and reciting that deep southern dialect (something as a kid from Illinois I had no other real exposure to, except maybe my dad’s best friend and his daughters we visited once down in Kentucky) in that old Golden Book. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that these were coming at me filtered through a white ear. The real thing was like feeling the warmth of the first spring sunrise, or the burst of an orange in your mouth, I suppose.

Well, after college, I kind of forgot about Zora, but she found her way back into my reading in other ways. I took an interest in Vodoun, and naturally came across her name in conjunction with her famous firsthand account of Haitian Vodoun in Tell My Horse (I think I probably saw her mentioned in Wade Davis’ Serpent And The Rainbow).

In reading that, I discovered the rich life of the woman whose fictional words had so struck me in school. I found that her real life was even more enticing than her prose.

Zora was one of a kind, and as I worked my way through her other folklore book Mules and Men, her short stories, her essays, through Moses, Man Of The Mountain and her personal letters, I came to love her ardently. I was enraptured by her biographies, knocked silly by her quotations and the bold and brassy way she came at life.

Just before the writing of this afterword, I happened across an old voice recording of her singing on Youtube and actually got flushed by the sound of her, as I would have if a school crush had suddenly whispered in my ear.

I can only imagine the effect she had on the men in her life. She was a charming woman by all accounts, and though she refers to herself as homely, her persona lends her an allure beyond anything any of her wildly varying photographs can capture; I mean, enough to make me head over heels for her decades after she walked the earth.

My favorite image of her has got to be the one where she’s mugging for the camera in a white dress and broad brimmed hat, a wide western gun belt slung around one cocked hip. Wotta woman!

But enough of my Tex Avery table pounding.

How did I come to write about her myself? Whatever made me think I could?

Well, the how came with Oscar Rios’ Golden Goblin Press putting out a call for Caribbean-themed Lovecraftian horror.

I knew I wanted to do something for it involving what I’d learned of Haitian Vodoun, and I flipped through Wade Davis and my Tell My Horse, and found a quote by Zora that kicked it all in motion;

“Research….is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.”

Writers of Lovecraftiana hone in on the word ‘cosmic’ like bees to pollen, of course, but what grabbed me was the difference between Davis’ and Zora’s approach to Vodoun. They were both scholars and adventurers, but Davis approached Vodoun possession and zombies from a dispassionate, scientific point of view, whereas Zora did not outright refute the mystic nature of the rite.

And why should she? She had submitted herself to the Hoodoo initiation ritual of Luke Turner in New Orleans, been painted with the lightning down her back, sworn to withhold the secret and sacred knowledge of more rituals than Davis had ever been allowed to observe.

Plus, in reading her autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, it can be inferred that there is much that Zora left unsaid. Of course I mean real things from her life that she glossed over; her birthdate, her actual birthplace (not her beloved Eatonville, but Notasulga, Alabama – but was she being dishonest here? Isn’t Eatonville where her heart always was, and thus her true birthplace?), the notorious condemnations of America’s foreign policy in World War II that the publisher excised, her uncomfortable prostrations to her white benefactress, Charlotte Osgood Mason.

Reading that book, a book she was not keen on writing in the first place, we are presented with a façade, a mask that Zora, as a black woman, likely had to present to white people all her life. Of course, reading close, we can still glimpse her looking out through the eye holes, but we have to look close.

So I started thinking of Zora as the type of woman who wouldn’t flinch at the Old Ones; an occult scholar more in the Robert E. Howard mode, and one who could be honor bound to keep secrets. For all that she recorded and published, what might she have held back?

Now the elephant in the room.

What made me, a white man, think I could write one of the most beloved and important African American women of the Harlem Renaissance?

I’m afraid any drawn out, carefully mulled-over answer I can concoct will end up sounding like a stereotypical display of white privilege at best, so I’ll just keep it to this;

Simply and truthfully, I love Zora Neale Hurston.

Through the joys and sorrows of her personal letters and through her published works, there are aspects of her experience that resonate deeply with me on a human level. I think she was amazing. I’m happy to have known her through her words, and I present these stories as a representation of that love, stemming from a desire to share my appreciation of her through my own weird medium.

I don’t know how this book will be taken. I’m completely, painfully aware of the possibility of giving William Styron levels of offense (or perhaps, Van Vechten is a more apt analogy). Readers are free to read this or ignore it as they see fit.

I think Joe Lansdale probably said it best (he certainly says most everything better than me) when he wrote;

We learn about one another by trying to step into one another’s shoes. They may not always fit as well as we would like, but we ought to try walking in them.

 I like to think Zora would get a kick out of this, and I hope she would take this book as the act of flattery and literary hero worship it is intended to be.

That’s all I got.

RAINBRINGER is a collection of fictional, weird adventure stories inspired by a public figure whom I’ve admired for years. They are not the story of that person.

The reality is better than anything I could come up with on my own, and has been related elsewhere by infinitely more qualified writers, such as Valerie Boyd’s WRAPPED IN RAINBOWS, Alicia D. Williams and Jacqueline Alcantara’s delightful Jump At The Sun: The True Life Tale Of Unstoppable Storyteller Zora Neale Hurston , I Love Myself When I Am Laughing…And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean And Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (edited by Alice Walker) , and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life In Letters by Dr. Carla Kaplan to name a few.

Seek the real Zora there.

I welcome any comments.

The Real Zora Neale Hurston

I wrote this introduction to my book RAINBRINGER: ZORA NEALE HURSTON AGAINST THE LOVECRAFTIAN MYTHOS to sort of cover my bases, but lately I’ve realized a lot of people aren’t aware the character in my book was inspired by a real person.

So, I’m putting this up here.

ZORA: A Brief, Inadequate, and Likely Inaccurate Summation of A Life

The Zora Neale Hurston depicted in this book is not the real person, of course.

The real Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida on January 15th in (according to her, at various times in her life) either 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1910.

Except she wasn’t.

She was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891.

Her birth year changed as it suited her purposes. She needed to apply for school, wanted to impress a younger man, whatever. She was somehow always vivacious and gregarious enough to sell her claims.

As to her hometown, you can’t blame Zora for claiming Eatonville. It was among the first all-black incorporated towns in the United States, and her father was once elected its mayor, helped write its laws, and was pastor of its largest Baptist church. Combined, these elements surely instilled in her a fierce sense of independence and pride that caught a number of her contemporaries later in life, black and white, by complete surprise.

According to her notoriously unreliable autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, she spent much of her idyllic and, it may be inferred, precocious childhood sitting on a fence post engaging strangers of every color as they passed by her house, and looking toward the horizon. As a child, like a young dreaming Joseph, she imagined that the moon followed her wherever she walked at night. Raised in a cradle of black achievement and black self-reliance, she claims she never even encountered racial animosity until she moved to a boarding school in Jacksonville. That became necessary following the devastating death of her beloved mother and untimely remarriage of her father to a woman she despised and purportedly nearly killed in a knock down drag out fight. When racism did rear its ugly head in her life, she was more bemused by it than blindsided.

She wrote, in How It Feels To Be Colored Me;

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

She got a job as a maid for the lead singer of a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and wound up in Baltimore, enrolling in Morgan State University. In 1918 she attended Howard, and in 1921, joined The Stylus, a literary club founded by the first African American Rhodes scholar, Alain Locke. She spent Saturday evenings in a literary salon on S Street in Washington DC, in the company of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

In 1925 she moved to Harlem and transferred to Barnard College in New York City, doing her first ethnographic work with Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead. She was Barnard’s first (and at the time, only) black student, and graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1928.

It was also in 1925 that Zora made her legendary big splash on the Harlem literary scene. Her short story Sweat and her stage play, Color Struck, a look at the taboo subject of colorism in the African American community, were published in Opportunity Magazine, and placed second in their respective categories in the magazine’s annual literary contest, Sweat losing to John F. Matheus’ Fog (and, to illustrate the impression Zora made that night, that took some digging to figure out).

Arriving at the posh awards dinner on May 1st, Zora flourished her vibrantly colored scarf, struck a pose in the doorway, and yelled “Colorrrrrrrrrr Struuuuuuuuck!” instantly cementing her place as the star of the evening, whatever her placing.

She forged a longtime friendship with the influential white socialite Fannie Hurst (author of Imitation of Life), and convinced the maître de of an upscale Vermont restaurant that she was an African princess so they could dine together. She also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes, there with his prize winning poem, The Weary Blues.

It was Hughes (or possibly Locke) who introduced her to wealthy white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, who sponsored (and, to Zora’s growing annoyance, directed, down to the most minute detail) her anthropological research trips through the south from 1927-1932.

In New Orleans, gathering material on Hoodoo for a book, she was inducted into the mysteries of the magical folk practice by Luke Turner following a grueling three day ritual.

She wrote Langston Hughes;

“I am getting in with the top of the profession. I know 18 tasks, including how to crown the spirit of death, and kill.”

After a falling out with Hughes regarding the ownership of their stage collaboration Mule Bone, Zora also broke her ties with Mason. She spent 1936-1937 studying religious practices in Jamaica and Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and famously met and interviewed Felicia Felix-Mentor, the first photographed zombie.

In was during this period she produced the main body of her best-regarded long form work; her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the ethnographic books, Mules And Men (1935), and Tell My Horse (1938), her novel Moses, Man Of The Mountain (1939) and her oft-cited romantic masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

After a series of failed ventures both financial and literary, a falsified charge of child molestation (she was out of the country and living in Honduras at the time the crime was supposed to have occurred), and her own outspoken and decidedly bootstrap conservative politics (she opposed school integration on the basis that the policy would hinder Afrocentric education, and that she saw “no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair.”) put her out of fashion and out of step with the growing Civil Rights movement, she gradually faded into obscurity, working as a teacher and again as a house maid on Rivo Alto Island in Miami Beach.

She suffered a stroke and died in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pearce, Florida, unable to find a publisher for a novel on Herod The Great. Her personal papers were saved from an inglorious end in a trash barrel fire by a passing acquaintance.

She was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pearce, her grave unmarked until it was rediscovered by the writer Alice Walker in 1973.

Zora was many things in the course of her life; anthropologist, author, teacher…she was probably never a Mythos detective.

As far as we know, anyway….

https://www.amazon.com/Rainbringer-Hurston-Against-Lovecraftian-Mythos-ebook/dp/B08YNH7JQ2

Meaner Than Hell Returns

Readers of my blog sometimes ask about the indie movie I shot for next-to-pennies (in Hollywood terms anyhow) back in 2009. You can get the full skinny on it by clicking the previous text. It was on Youtube for a fair amount of time, and got several thousand hits, but we took it down, and Ryan Gerossie my editor did some trimming and color correction, we got it subtitled, and today it’s up on Amazon Prime. So go check it out if you’re interested. It’s no Chato’s Land, but it was a labor of love and I’m glad I did it.

Thanks to the wonderful actors and crew, most of whom have gone on to bigger and better things. You all did a helluva job with very little to work with. Watching this kinda makes me wanna do something else….maybe watch your emails (or block me – haha).

If they get Prime in the Great Beyond, then I hope Thomas ‘Tope’ Crnkovich has stopped scrolling and is now looking down and smiling.

Go give it a watch on Prime before the fine folks at Amazon come to their senses and take it down.

Guess I should get cracking on that novelization I’ve been hammering out now and then for the past year….

Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos

May 4th will see the release of my collection (really, a novel in eight stories) RAINBRINGER: ZORA NEALE HURSTON AGAINST THE LOVECRAFTIAN MYTHOS, which bundles together three previously published stories and five never before seen, all featuring the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston (read about her here) reimagined as a Mythos detective.

You can preorder the book here. https://www.amazon.com/Rainbringer-Hurston-Against-Lovecraftian-Mythos-ebook/dp/B08YNH7JQ2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=rainbringer+erdelac&qid=1616448793&sr=8-1

In the next seven weeks leading up to release, I’ll be posting a little bit about each included story as well as the opening paragraph, beginning today with LEAVES FLOATING IN A DREAM’S WAKE, which is an epistolary story I wrote to kick off this collection.

It finds Zora in New York City in 1925, having just transferred from the historically black Howard University in Washington, DC to enroll in Barnard College as its first African American student. She is pursuing her studies and aspiring to write, looking back at the love she left behind, and struggling to make ends meet when she experiences a peculiar prophetic dream during an earthquake on the night of February 28, 1925, a dream shared not just by several Harlem artists, but unknown to her, receptive creatives around the globe.

The earthquake in question is the 6.2 Charlevoix-Kamouraska earthquake which was felt in New York City (and, Lovecraftian afficionados will recognize as the likely source of the quake mentioned in The Call of Cthulhu).
————————————————————————————–
January 19th, 1925

Dearest Herbert,

Thank you kindly for your sincere well wishes on the occasion of my latest and what I hope will be my greatest run around the sun. I am well as can be and hope most ardently that you are the same. I was reluctant to write you. I wanted to give you your space after all. I guess the distance between Chicago and New York City should probably be all the space anybody would ever want, but of course, I meant time. I think of you more often than I like, if I am being honest, which, with you, I always am.

Tell me how your courses are going at Rush. I know Chi is the Windy City, so I can’t even imagine the level of gales that blow through your clothes. Here in Harlem it is cold, cold cold! And you know how my teeth used to chatter walking home from S Street! My Florida blood is too thin for these northern winds. I wish you were here to warm me.

Yet, I am not so lonely that I will be throwing myself from my window. No, not even over you, my doctor to be. Harlem is a dream, and calls to mind old Eatonville, but dressed up in grown folks’ clothes. My people here don’t slouch when they walk, and standing on the corner of Seventh and 135th is like people watching in front of my family’s house again.

Negroes flow by like a great muddy river, in every lovely shade of beautiful black, and it is tempting to jump on the running boards of the shiny cars or slip my arms through stranger’s elbows, just to lose myself in the current and float down whatever eddy is moving swiftest.

Oh, and I am. I am dancing with poets, singers, jazz men and other liars. Every tongue and every spine is loose. I saw none other than Duke Ellington play at a rent party last Saturday night. The next time you are in town I will take you to a buffet flat, but don’t ask what that is – I want to see the look on your face. I imagine it will be much like my own was the first time I went with Angelina Grimke.

Yes, I have reconnected with a few of the old Saturday Nighters here. James Johnson is only a few blocks down from me. Of course I am in contact with Dr. Locke, and have been over to Dr. Johnson’s home for dinner a few times. His wife is a lovely person and a tremendous cook. Whenever I dine with them and I at last push away in surrender from their bounteous table, I expect to see a bill waiting to be paid, but so far so good, which is good, because brother, I am broke and it is no joke.

I’ve been working as a manicurist again to make ends meet, wearing down my own nails at night on the typewriter. I’m working on a story, Spunk, which I hope Dr. Johnson will go for, and kicking around the idea of a play. Dr. Locke is guest editing an all-Negro issue of Survey Graphic in March and will be showcasing a number of Negro writers, so I hope to have something in that.

I’m not at the Nicholas Avenue address anymore. Use this one instead.

                                                                                                                                 Devotedly,

                                                                                                                            Zora Neale Hurston

———————————————————————————————————————–

Cover Reveal: Rainbringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos

To mark the passing of HP Lovecraft (84 years ago today), Fantasy Book Critic has revealed the cover for my forthcoming eight story collection of Zora Neale Hurston-as-a-Mythos-detective stories, featuring art and design by Jabari Weathers and Shawn King of STK Creations respectively.

Give it a look here!
https://fantasybookcritic.blogspot.com/2021/03/exclusive-cover-reveal-rainbringer-zora.html

You can preorder the book on Amazon. It’s due out May 4th, in honor of (no, not Star Wars) the release of Zora’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, back in 1934.

New Cover For Betrayal On Monster Earth

Betrayal On Monster Earth, #2 in Jim Beard and James Palmer’s sci fi anthology in which giant kaiju monsters take the place of nuclear arsenals in a worldwide cold war has a spiffy brand new cover image.

This one has one of my favorite stories I’ve done, A Haunt of Jackals, in which a pair of Rampage-inspired ‘suicide’ bombers inject themselves with a serum that turns them into colossal jackal men and sends them tearing through Jerusalem, while Israel’s enormous golem-man The Magen rushes to intercept.

More about that here –
https://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/a-haunt-of-jackals-in-betrayal-on-monster-earth/

And, you can read that in my collection, Angler In Darkness.
https://www.amazon.com/Angler-Darkness-Collection-Edward-Erdelac/dp/1543231950

Reviews for Conquer!

A couple of kindly reviews of my new collection CONQUER have appeared around the web.

“From Monster Librarian –
https://www.monsterlibrarian.com/TheCirculationDesk/book-review-conquer-john-conquer-series-book-1-by-edward-m-erdelac/

From Horror Buzz –
https://www.horrorbuzz.com/2021/02/16/conquer-is-a-refreshing-and-exhilarating-new-spin-on-the-occult-detective/

From Our Own Voices, courtesy of Night Worms –
https://nightworms.com/blogs/news/own-voices-book-review-conquer-by-edward-m-erdelac

Pick up a copy here –
https://www.amazon.com/Conquer-Edward-M-Erdelac/dp/B08R49592X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Happy Birthday, Zora Neale Hurston

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers, Zora Neale Hurston, a queen of the Harlem Renaissance, groundbreaking ethnologist, folklorist, and Hoodoo initiate.

In my forthcoming collection, Rain-Bringer: Zora Neale Hurston Against The Lovecraftian Mythos, I reimagine her as an intrepid folklorist, finding herself in opposition to Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones and their denizens at various points in her illustrious career. In Beyond The Black Arcade, she and her Hoodoo mentor deal with the repercussions of the Louisiana State Police smashing a Cthulhu cult deep in the bayou, a cult which was keeping a more terrible danger at bay. In King Yeller, Zora must prevent a young Orson Welles from staging an all-Negro production of The King In Yellow at The Lafayette Theater in Harlem. In Shadow In The Chapel Of Ease, an offshoot of The Starry Wisdom Cult rises up among the Sanctified Churches of Georgia. Gods Of The Grim Nation finds Zora in Haiti, working with a handsome young houngan to stop a bokor from persecuting the local Vodoun societies. Black Woman, White City has Zora chasing down the legendary City of The Monkey God in Honduras.

The real Zora Neale Hurston was born in Eatonville, Florida on January 15th, in (according to her, at various times in her life) either 1898, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902, 1903, and 1910.

Except she wasn’t.

She was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama on January 7, 1891.

Her birth year changed as it suited her purposes. She needed to apply for school, wanted to impress a younger man, whatever. She was somehow always vivacious and gregarious enough to sell her claims.

As to her hometown, you can’t blame Zora for claiming Eatonville. It was among the first all-black incorporated towns in the United States, and her father was once elected its mayor, helped write its laws, and was pastor of its largest Baptist church. Combined, these elements surely instilled in her a fierce sense of independence and pride that caught a number of her contemporaries later in life, black and white, by complete surprise.

According to her notoriously unreliable autobiography, Dust Tracks On A Road, she spent much of her idyllic and, it may be inferred, precocious childhood sitting on a fence post engaging strangers of every color as they passed by her house, and looking toward the horizon. As a child, like a young dreaming Joseph, she imagined that the moon followed her wherever she walked at night. Raised in a cradle of black achievement and black self-reliance, she claims she never even encountered racial animosity until she moved to a boarding school in Jacksonville. That became necessary following the devastating death of her beloved mother and untimely remarriage of her father to a woman she despised and purportedly nearly killed in a knock down drag out fight. When racism did rear its ugly head in her life, she was more bemused by it than blindsided.

She wrote, in How It Feels To Be Colored Me;

“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

She got a job as a maid for the lead singer of a traveling Gilbert and Sullivan troupe and wound up in Baltimore, enrolling in Morgan State University. In 1918 she attended Howard, and in 1921, joined The Stylus, a literary club founded by the first African American Rhodes scholar, Alain Locke. She spent Saturday evenings in a literary salon on S Street in Washington DC, in the company of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson.

In 1925 she moved to Harlem and transferred to Barnard College in New York City, doing her first ethnographic work with Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas, and Margaret Mead. She was Barnard’s first (and at the time, only) black student, and graduated with a degree in anthropology in 1928.

It was also in 1925 that Zora made her legendary big splash on the Harlem literary scene. Her short story Sweat and her stage play, Color Struck, a look at the taboo subject of colorism in the African American community, were published in Opportunity Magazine, and placed second in their respective categories in the magazine’s annual literary contest, Sweat losing to John F. Matheus’ Fog (and, to illustrate the impression Zora made that night, that took some digging to figure out).

Arriving at the posh awards dinner on May 1st, Zora flourished her vibrantly colored scarf, struck a pose in the doorway, and yelled “Colorrrrrrrrrr Struuuuuuuuck!” instantly cementing her place as the star of the evening, whatever her placing.

She forged a longtime friendship with the influential white socialite Fannie Hurst (author of Imitation of Life), and convinced the maître de of an upscale Vermont restaurant that she was an African princess so they could dine together. She also made the acquaintance of Langston Hughes, there with his prize winning poem, The Weary Blues.

It was Hughes (or possibly Locke) who introduced her to wealthy white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, who sponsored (and, to Zora’s growing annoyance, directed, down to the most minute detail) her anthropological research trips through the south from 1927-1932.

In New Orleans, gathering material on Hoodoo for a book, she was inducted into the mysteries of the magical folk practice by Luke Turner following a grueling three day ritual.

She wrote Langston Hughes;

“I am getting in with the top of the profession. I know 18 tasks, including how to crown the spirit of death, and kill.”

After a falling out with Hughes regarding the ownership of their stage collaboration Mule Bone, Zora also broke her ties with Mason. She spent 1936-1937 studying religious practices in Jamaica and Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and famously met and interviewed Felicia Felix-Mentor, the first photographed zombie.

In was during this period she produced the main body of her best-regarded long form work; her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), the ethnographic books, Mules And Men (1935), and Tell My Horse (1938), her novel Moses, Man Of The Mountain (1939) and her oft-cited romantic masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

After a series of failed ventures both financial and literary, a falsified charge of child molestation (she was out of the country and living in Honduras at the time the crime was supposed to have occurred), and her own outspoken and decidedly bootstrap conservative politics (she opposed school integration on the basis that the policy would hinder Afrocentric education, and that she saw “no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair.”) put her out of fashion and out of step with the growing Civil Rights movement, she gradually faded into obscurity, working as a teacher and again as a house maid on Rivo Alto Island in Miami Beach.

She suffered a stroke and died in the St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Fort Pearce, Florida, unable to find a publisher for a novel on Herod The Great. Her personal papers were saved from an inglorious end in a trash barrel fire by a passing acquaintance.

She was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pearce, her grave unmarked until it was rediscovered by the writer Alice Walker in 1973.

Zora was many things in the course of her life; anthropologist, author, teacher…she was probably never a Mythos detective.

As far as we know, anyway….

The Print Edition of Conquer is Up!

Don’t sleep on this one! Shawn T. King did an amazing job of recreating the look of the old Ernest Tidyman Shaft books.