What do you think?
Rate this book
Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S. Whitehead. by Henry S. Whitehead
Let Henry S. Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world of voodoo where beasts invade the mind of man and where lives of the living are racked by the spirits of the dead. With deceptive simplicity and chilling realism, WhiteheadOCOs "Voodoo Tales "are amongst the most frightening ever written."
1062 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2012
39 people are currently reading
309 people want to read
About the author
Henry S. Whitehead
143 books12 followersHenry Whitehead was an American Episcopal minister and author of horror and fantasy fiction.
Henry S. Whitehead was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on March 5, 1882, and graduated from Harvard University in 1904 (in the same class as Franklin D. Roosevelt). As a young man he led an active and worldly life in the first decade of the 20th century, playing football at Harvard University, editing a Reform democratic newspaper in Port Chester, New York, and serving as commissioner of athletics for the AAU.
He later attended Berkeley Divinity School in Middletown, Connecticut, and in 1912 he was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. During 1912-1913 he worked as a clergyman in Torrington, Connecticut. From 1913 to 1917 he served as rector in Christ's Church, Middletown, Connecticut. From 1918 to 1919 he was Pastor of the Children, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York City.
He served as Archdeacon of the Virgin Islands from 1921 to 1929. While there, living on the island of St. Croix, Whitehead gathered the material he was to use in his tales of the supernatural. A correspondent and friend of H. P. Lovecraft, Whitehead published stories from 1924 onward in Adventure, Black Mask, Strange Tales, and especially Weird Tales. In his introduction to the collection Jumbee, R. H. Barlow would later describe Whitehead as a member of "the serious Weird Tales school".Many of Whitehead's stories are set on the Virgin Islands and draw on the history and folklore of the region. Several of these stories are narrated by Gerald Canevin, a New Englander living on the islands and a fictional stand-in for Whitehead. Whitehead's supernatural fiction was partially modelled on the work of Edward Lucas White and William Hope Hodgson. Whitehead's "The Great Circle" (1932) is a lost-race tale with sword and sorcery elements.
In later life, Whitehead lived in Dunedin, Florida, as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd and a leader of a boys' group there. H. P. Lovecraft was a particular friend as well as a correspondent of Whitehead's, visiting him at his Dunedin home for several weeks in 1931. Lovecraft recorded in his letters that he entertained the boys with readings of his stories such as "The Cats of Ulthar". Lovecraft said of Whitehead: "He has nothing of the musty cleric about him; but dresses in sports clothes, swears like a he-man on occasion, and is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness of any sort."
Whitehead suffered from a long-term gastric problem, but an account of his death by his assistant suggests he died from a fall or a stroke or both. He died late in 1932, but few of his readers learned about this until an announcement and brief profile, by H. P. Lovecraft, appeared in the March 1933 Weird Tales, issued in Feb 1933. Whitehead was greatly mourned and missed by lovers of weird fiction at his death.
R. H. Barlow collected many of Whitehead's letters, planning to publish a volume of them; but this never appeared, although Barlow did contribute the introduction to Whitehead's Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944).
Henry S. Whitehead was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, on March 5, 1882, and graduated from Harvard University in 1904 (in the same class as Franklin D. Roosevelt). As a young man he led an active and worldly life in the first decade of the 20th century, playing football at Harvard University, editing a Reform democratic newspaper in Port Chester, New York, and serving as commissioner of athletics for the AAU.
He later attended Berkeley Divinity School in Middletown, Connecticut, and in 1912 he was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church. During 1912-1913 he worked as a clergyman in Torrington, Connecticut. From 1913 to 1917 he served as rector in Christ's Church, Middletown, Connecticut. From 1918 to 1919 he was Pastor of the Children, Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York City.
He served as Archdeacon of the Virgin Islands from 1921 to 1929. While there, living on the island of St. Croix, Whitehead gathered the material he was to use in his tales of the supernatural. A correspondent and friend of H. P. Lovecraft, Whitehead published stories from 1924 onward in Adventure, Black Mask, Strange Tales, and especially Weird Tales. In his introduction to the collection Jumbee, R. H. Barlow would later describe Whitehead as a member of "the serious Weird Tales school".Many of Whitehead's stories are set on the Virgin Islands and draw on the history and folklore of the region. Several of these stories are narrated by Gerald Canevin, a New Englander living on the islands and a fictional stand-in for Whitehead. Whitehead's supernatural fiction was partially modelled on the work of Edward Lucas White and William Hope Hodgson. Whitehead's "The Great Circle" (1932) is a lost-race tale with sword and sorcery elements.
In later life, Whitehead lived in Dunedin, Florida, as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd and a leader of a boys' group there. H. P. Lovecraft was a particular friend as well as a correspondent of Whitehead's, visiting him at his Dunedin home for several weeks in 1931. Lovecraft recorded in his letters that he entertained the boys with readings of his stories such as "The Cats of Ulthar". Lovecraft said of Whitehead: "He has nothing of the musty cleric about him; but dresses in sports clothes, swears like a he-man on occasion, and is an utter stranger to bigotry or priggishness of any sort."
Whitehead suffered from a long-term gastric problem, but an account of his death by his assistant suggests he died from a fall or a stroke or both. He died late in 1932, but few of his readers learned about this until an announcement and brief profile, by H. P. Lovecraft, appeared in the March 1933 Weird Tales, issued in Feb 1933. Whitehead was greatly mourned and missed by lovers of weird fiction at his death.
R. H. Barlow collected many of Whitehead's letters, planning to publish a volume of them; but this never appeared, although Barlow did contribute the introduction to Whitehead's Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales (1944).
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 8, 2023
Well, I haven't read the whole thing, just a mop-up of the stories from my "to be read" list. Back on the shelf it goes for when I have the time to read everything else.
"The People Of Pan" - an operative for a logging concern surveys the mahogany available on a small, empty island near Cuba and accidentally stumbles upon a lost civilization, a remnant of Atlantis, living a half mile underground in vast caverns - peaceful worshipers of Pan. But, on leaving to complete his mission, he returns about a year later to a startling discovery... Well, this is an odd sort of story for me - the 1930s were the heyday of "Lost World/Lost Civilization" adventures narratives (not really my kind of thing). The ramp-up is pretty good (I liked the generally underused Christian, the native assistant/servant with a huge vocabulary) and a series of mysteries/discoveries to be solved. But the middle is a bit expositional and the ending (without giving it away) is oddly melancholic. Strange.
***UPDATE*** Final story of my current pass through on Whitehead finished up. "Seven Turns In A Hangman's Rope" is a longish story - an historical adventure story with a mild genre element placed into a larger weird "frame." An old painting in uncovered which depicts the public hanging of notorious pirate Captain Fawcett and his compatriots in the Dutch West Indies in 1825, and the painting proves to exhibit some odd properties. The majority of the story then narrates the historical events themselves, involving the Captain-turned-pirate Saul Macartney and his betrayed lady-love and cousin, Camilla Macartney, and how Saul enters into his skullduggerous ways...and the price he pays for it, due to Camilla's unexpected knowledge of the arts of Voodoo. The return to the frame offers a nice sympathetic and merciful rounding off. A good story, if a bit long.
******
What I did read:
Whitehead is an interesting member of the pulp-era writers. He was very obviously not just pounding it out for the rags, and - for a guy from Elizabeth, New Jersey - has a vaguely British literary quality to his works, at least in the sense of a stately, calm pacing, erudition and overall control of the "weird tale" text. He's also, most of the time, a pretty good example of a specific sub-genre of authors - the "writer as amateur anthropologist/folklorist" (Manly Wade Wellman might be another example), immersed in a foreign (or unfamiliar to the mainstream of the time) culture and (with all observations of colonialism and imperialist attitudes given their credence) actively *interested* in putting down some version of the (in this specific case) island life and folkways of the foreign culture he observes (as opposed to just exploiting it for unfamiliar "monsters"). Now, we're all mature adults here, most of whom went to college (I assume) so, yes, there will be "othering" going on in these stories of West Indian "blacks" written by a white guy back at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (if you're shocked, I;m shocked that you're shocked!) - but Whitehead often argues *for* the views of the natives and the validity of their belief systems - which, depending on who you are and where/what era you come from and how much of an ax you have to grind and how forgiving/understanding you are of the past and how much you want to draw attention to *yourself* instead of the actual subject and how superior you feel and how much you want to easily/lazily dismiss engaging anything older than the year 2000 - is either refreshing and honest or understandably flawed or paternalistic or classist or just "white guilt" - take your pick, they're *all* somewhat true approaches to some degree or another, regardless of what your reactionary conservative political blogmaster or hip progressive teacher tells you. Figure it out yourself - people lived their lives and worked at their craft (if the writer is any good at all and not some hack) sometimes in unknowable circumstances, and then died. These are their records of some things they thought, flawed human that they were. That's all you get. (There's a very good chance, no matter how well intentioned you are, that *you* won't be remembered well in 300 years either. The transhumanic, genderless, ex-orbital jelly-brains of 2315 have spoken!)
(sorry for the cranky tangent - smart people acting reductively and self-servingly has always rubbed me the wrong way and the internet just seems to be accelerating and magnifying the problem recently. Wells had it right, it seems - Eloi and Morlocks are our fate. So much for the quiet dignity of complex reasoning and the charitable response!)
I'd read a few things by Whitehead over the years and my notes tell me that I'd previously found him a fair-to-middling writer - that is to say, solidly entertaining at the best, weak-but-not-terrible at the worst, but also without any particular story that leaped out at me as amazing. My recent reading continues that trend, although I seem to have hit a set of more solid tales this time out (or my tastes and critical skills have just matured over time) - which would make sense, as these are from my long-curated notes specifically directing me to "notable" stories.
One oddity here, "The Trap" was co-written with H.P. Lovecraft and seems a bit overwrought. A small flaw is noticed in a recently-exposed antique mirror and almost immediately afterwards a young boy disappears from a private school. Luckily (or clunkily, take your pick) our narrator has some background in the Eastern meditational arts and soon realizes that the mirror has sorcerous origins and conceals a trapdoor to an other-dimensional reverse dimension (which, to be honest, seems likely the invention/influence of Lovecraft, as Whitehead rarely gets this outré) - something like Lewis Carroll transposed into pulp fiction. The fusion of sorcery and relativistic physics of the time is interesting and I like that the story goes in a slightly different direction than the norm for these things: as opposed to descriptions in "scientific romances", the dimension (described in phantasmagoric and grotesque colors) is not an "infinite realm of strange sights and fantastic denizens" but monotonous, fragmented and frustratingly limited for those (even the evil ones) "transitioned" into it. Not fun at all! The telepathic transmissions from the trapped boy have some added quality of desperation I found engaging (. Without the influence of Lovecraft, but on a similar tip, Whitehead produced "West India Lights" where an old painting of the execution of a historical pirate is rediscovered. Our characters notice that one small figure in the background (a compatriot also being hanged) seems to be moving occasionally (thus, some similarities with M.R. James' "The Mezzotint") and eventually limited communication with the figure is established, leading to a buried treasure and the discharge of a sorcerous curse. Enjoyable, a solid "weird tale" with no horrific events. An earlier story, "The Door" is a nicely done, if overly familiar, ghost story in which a ne'er do well son, on his way back to his home apartment (from which he has been ostracized by his father and mother in disgrace - but they are on vacation), finds that his key - and the locks have not been changed - just WILL not turn and maybe he ought to have payed more attention to that commotion out in the street as he came up...
As mentioned before, many of Whitehead's stories are spun out of the local folk beliefs of the West Indies black culture - Vodun and other syncretic religions carried over from Africa with the slaves. And of course, many of these stories are about whites running afoul of these traditions. So in "Hill Drums" a pompous diplomat stationed in St. Thomas makes the mistake of writing a disparaging article about his islands and, when word trickles down to the native population they "make a song" on him, a maddeningly incessant ditty, insulting and vaguely threatening (it actually reminded me of the idea of an "aural newspaper" that Calypso and some early rap music embodied), that travels the island and becomes an earworm for the diplomat. This is a good example of the "weird tale" - nothing horrific happens but Whitehead has a solid, observed understanding of how native magic "works", in a psychological reinforcement / anthropological sense. Similar to this is "Black Terror", wherein a small-time criminal son of a native Christian woman has a vodun styled curse put on him with a countdown to his death (the curse has a great little component that involves stealing one of the boy's shirts, putting it on a dead man before he is buried, digging him up 3 days later and returning the shirt to the cursed person unawares). This is a fairly typical plot so Whitehead makes the focus on the clash of belief systems in the islands, as a local priest attempts to overlay Christian beliefs over vodun and convince the boy (and his mother) that Jesus is more powerful that Damballah. "Sweet Grass" is an interesting record of cultural class, race and gender sensibilities of the time. Cornelius Hansen, a lonesome Dutchman in Santa Cruz, shows mild interest (not even a dalliance, just a discussion interaction!) with a beautiful native girl instead of the "suitable" and expected Caucasian landholder's daughter. When he decides to marry the landholder's daughter anyway, the native girl and her mother use sympathetic magic (a voodoo doll) to torture Hansen, until his new wife demands that it stops. There's all kinds of cultural stuff that can be unpacked from this story: caution about sowing one's oats, class reasons for choosing "suitable" wives (they fight for you), and subtle warnings about potential miscegenation. Interesting.
"Jumbee", contrary to what you might expect, is not exactly a "zombie" tale but instead highlights some of the more arcane figures of island folklore as a retired WWI veteran interrogates a local native gentleman about details of certain beliefs. Lafcadio Hearn gets a mention and there is much local flavor of St. Croix captured in this small-scale ghost story (for example, the overwhelming scent of potted tube-roses in the night air - for a pulp writer, Whitehead is fairly controlled with his "atmospherics", giving it to us in the setting - "Sweet Grass" is another example - but rarely "in the moment"). As noted here Hanging Jumbee are a trio of ghastly suspended spectral figures that slowly turn in the air (although they are not, it is specifically noted, figures of the "lynched" dead) and are encountered by the roadside as a death omen. Also, a spectral old woman encountered on a staircase seems to be some kind of witch/were-dog. Again, interesting.
"The Tree-Man", one Silvio Fabricius, is a worker on a Virgin Island plantation who has been given the task of tending to a sacred tree (the imported Dahomeyans workers having brought their obayi with them). But things go awry when the local Plantation owner fails to see the folkloric import of such a function and, of course (in classic fable structure), the protected tree is "the best one on the property" . Whitehead does a great job (for a religious Christian, and given his limited cultural assumptions of the time, writing about a culture not his own and recording attitudes and events from long in his past) of attempting to explain that the imported animism of the Dahomeyans is neither "stupid" nor "evil". This is a very straight-ahead story (almost exactly what you think will occur, occurs) but I found it surprisingly pleasant nonetheless.
Interestingly, Whitehead has an occasional thread of proto-"body horror" running through his oeuvre. "The Lips" makes use of the same threat featured in Edward Lucas White's notable (and notorious) African curse story "Lukundoo" (here the curse is rendered l'kundu). The skipper of a slave ship, bitten on the neck by one of his abused charges, finds the wound beginning to mutate in unexpected ways. The manifestation of the curse is just as disgusting (and, yes, racially charged) as it is in the White tale, but perhaps dialed just a smidgen back in grotesqueness. “Passing of a God” treats native religious beliefs (vodun, in this case) with some respect (outside of the usual “it's meant to be respected simply to visit a curse on the iconoclast that busts the taboo” storytelling device), and so racial relations percolate vaguely in the background as well. Here we have a Whitehead body-horror piece poised between the poles of magical belief and scientific reasoning, this time involving cancer theory of the time (those familiar with E.F. Benson's “Caterpillars” may see a resemblance as well). Finally in this vein is "Cassius" which I found to be the most memorable thing I read here, a strange mash-up of ideas from Stephen King's THE DARK HALF, the film BASKET CASE and Richard Matheson's short story "Prey", but preceding all of them. A servant, Brutus, undergoes some minor surgery, then finds himself plagued by a miniature savage attacker (there's a very powerful and creepy image of the creature ritually dancing besides the sleeping man before it attacks) that seems to dwell in a tiny hive/hut in the garden. Interestingly, there are no supernatural elements in this story and while Whitehead can be faulted for extending the tale a bit too long with his rationalizing explanations, it is also chock a block with intriguing ideas (Brutus was baptized, so what does that imply for the creature?) and impressively grotesque in its own way. "Sea Change" (originally published in WEIRD TALES) is a pleasantly surprising find. A young man and his new wife, on their honeymoon voyage, are cast adrift on a desert island. But the man has a dark secret - in his childhood he had suffered a glandular deficiency that had reduced him to a monstrous and imbecilic state of cretinism, but which was eventually reversed through daily doses of thyroid medication which he has continued to take daily for his entire life. And now, here he is stuck in paradise with 40 natives, abundant food and water, but only 8 more doses - and a trading ship due in a year...or two. Can he swim the distance to the wrecked ship and dive for the larger store of medicine in his cabin, which should keep him safe until rescue? What is presented as a challenge driven by desperation, something like an adventure story with macabre overtones, resolves itself into an unexpectedly positive piece about overcoming fear and the exercise of free-will. I liked it!
A slight mention should be made of Whitehead's "series character", Gerald Canevin. I put that in quotes because Canevin isn't much of a character (well, maybe that's harsh) and his adventures aren't much of a series, just things that happen to him or people he knows. Canevin is a useful, ambulatory story frame, a guy for people to tell their stories to. He does have some characteristics and back history, but spends a good majority of almost every narrative off-stage, listening or giving us a tidbit of information to provide context, although every once in a while he's involved in a plot directly. An odd duck. For example, take "The Chadbourne Episode" which involves Canevin finding out that his family summer home in Connecticut, which he rents during the season as he's off in the West Indies, has been occupied by some mysterious Persians who intrigued the town with their mysterious, "foreign" ways before returning home at the end of the season. Except they seem to have left something nasty behind, which haunts the cemetery, kills local livestock and pets, and now seems to have preyed on a child. It's an effective little monster story (essentially just retelling Edward Lucas White's Middle-Eastern monster yarn "Amina" but taking up the challenge posed at the end of that story by setting it in New England), and Canevin gets to walk into the ending conflict and act as a violence-bearing arbiter of goodness and light.
And that's it. When and if this books turns up on my reading list again, I'll expand this review.
"The People Of Pan" - an operative for a logging concern surveys the mahogany available on a small, empty island near Cuba and accidentally stumbles upon a lost civilization, a remnant of Atlantis, living a half mile underground in vast caverns - peaceful worshipers of Pan. But, on leaving to complete his mission, he returns about a year later to a startling discovery... Well, this is an odd sort of story for me - the 1930s were the heyday of "Lost World/Lost Civilization" adventures narratives (not really my kind of thing). The ramp-up is pretty good (I liked the generally underused Christian, the native assistant/servant with a huge vocabulary) and a series of mysteries/discoveries to be solved. But the middle is a bit expositional and the ending (without giving it away) is oddly melancholic. Strange.
***UPDATE*** Final story of my current pass through on Whitehead finished up. "Seven Turns In A Hangman's Rope" is a longish story - an historical adventure story with a mild genre element placed into a larger weird "frame." An old painting in uncovered which depicts the public hanging of notorious pirate Captain Fawcett and his compatriots in the Dutch West Indies in 1825, and the painting proves to exhibit some odd properties. The majority of the story then narrates the historical events themselves, involving the Captain-turned-pirate Saul Macartney and his betrayed lady-love and cousin, Camilla Macartney, and how Saul enters into his skullduggerous ways...and the price he pays for it, due to Camilla's unexpected knowledge of the arts of Voodoo. The return to the frame offers a nice sympathetic and merciful rounding off. A good story, if a bit long.
******
What I did read:
Whitehead is an interesting member of the pulp-era writers. He was very obviously not just pounding it out for the rags, and - for a guy from Elizabeth, New Jersey - has a vaguely British literary quality to his works, at least in the sense of a stately, calm pacing, erudition and overall control of the "weird tale" text. He's also, most of the time, a pretty good example of a specific sub-genre of authors - the "writer as amateur anthropologist/folklorist" (Manly Wade Wellman might be another example), immersed in a foreign (or unfamiliar to the mainstream of the time) culture and (with all observations of colonialism and imperialist attitudes given their credence) actively *interested* in putting down some version of the (in this specific case) island life and folkways of the foreign culture he observes (as opposed to just exploiting it for unfamiliar "monsters"). Now, we're all mature adults here, most of whom went to college (I assume) so, yes, there will be "othering" going on in these stories of West Indian "blacks" written by a white guy back at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (if you're shocked, I;m shocked that you're shocked!) - but Whitehead often argues *for* the views of the natives and the validity of their belief systems - which, depending on who you are and where/what era you come from and how much of an ax you have to grind and how forgiving/understanding you are of the past and how much you want to draw attention to *yourself* instead of the actual subject and how superior you feel and how much you want to easily/lazily dismiss engaging anything older than the year 2000 - is either refreshing and honest or understandably flawed or paternalistic or classist or just "white guilt" - take your pick, they're *all* somewhat true approaches to some degree or another, regardless of what your reactionary conservative political blogmaster or hip progressive teacher tells you. Figure it out yourself - people lived their lives and worked at their craft (if the writer is any good at all and not some hack) sometimes in unknowable circumstances, and then died. These are their records of some things they thought, flawed human that they were. That's all you get. (There's a very good chance, no matter how well intentioned you are, that *you* won't be remembered well in 300 years either. The transhumanic, genderless, ex-orbital jelly-brains of 2315 have spoken!)
(sorry for the cranky tangent - smart people acting reductively and self-servingly has always rubbed me the wrong way and the internet just seems to be accelerating and magnifying the problem recently. Wells had it right, it seems - Eloi and Morlocks are our fate. So much for the quiet dignity of complex reasoning and the charitable response!)
I'd read a few things by Whitehead over the years and my notes tell me that I'd previously found him a fair-to-middling writer - that is to say, solidly entertaining at the best, weak-but-not-terrible at the worst, but also without any particular story that leaped out at me as amazing. My recent reading continues that trend, although I seem to have hit a set of more solid tales this time out (or my tastes and critical skills have just matured over time) - which would make sense, as these are from my long-curated notes specifically directing me to "notable" stories.
One oddity here, "The Trap" was co-written with H.P. Lovecraft and seems a bit overwrought. A small flaw is noticed in a recently-exposed antique mirror and almost immediately afterwards a young boy disappears from a private school. Luckily (or clunkily, take your pick) our narrator has some background in the Eastern meditational arts and soon realizes that the mirror has sorcerous origins and conceals a trapdoor to an other-dimensional reverse dimension (which, to be honest, seems likely the invention/influence of Lovecraft, as Whitehead rarely gets this outré) - something like Lewis Carroll transposed into pulp fiction. The fusion of sorcery and relativistic physics of the time is interesting and I like that the story goes in a slightly different direction than the norm for these things: as opposed to descriptions in "scientific romances", the dimension (described in phantasmagoric and grotesque colors) is not an "infinite realm of strange sights and fantastic denizens" but monotonous, fragmented and frustratingly limited for those (even the evil ones) "transitioned" into it. Not fun at all! The telepathic transmissions from the trapped boy have some added quality of desperation I found engaging (. Without the influence of Lovecraft, but on a similar tip, Whitehead produced "West India Lights" where an old painting of the execution of a historical pirate is rediscovered. Our characters notice that one small figure in the background (a compatriot also being hanged) seems to be moving occasionally (thus, some similarities with M.R. James' "The Mezzotint") and eventually limited communication with the figure is established, leading to a buried treasure and the discharge of a sorcerous curse. Enjoyable, a solid "weird tale" with no horrific events. An earlier story, "The Door" is a nicely done, if overly familiar, ghost story in which a ne'er do well son, on his way back to his home apartment (from which he has been ostracized by his father and mother in disgrace - but they are on vacation), finds that his key - and the locks have not been changed - just WILL not turn and maybe he ought to have payed more attention to that commotion out in the street as he came up...
As mentioned before, many of Whitehead's stories are spun out of the local folk beliefs of the West Indies black culture - Vodun and other syncretic religions carried over from Africa with the slaves. And of course, many of these stories are about whites running afoul of these traditions. So in "Hill Drums" a pompous diplomat stationed in St. Thomas makes the mistake of writing a disparaging article about his islands and, when word trickles down to the native population they "make a song" on him, a maddeningly incessant ditty, insulting and vaguely threatening (it actually reminded me of the idea of an "aural newspaper" that Calypso and some early rap music embodied), that travels the island and becomes an earworm for the diplomat. This is a good example of the "weird tale" - nothing horrific happens but Whitehead has a solid, observed understanding of how native magic "works", in a psychological reinforcement / anthropological sense. Similar to this is "Black Terror", wherein a small-time criminal son of a native Christian woman has a vodun styled curse put on him with a countdown to his death (the curse has a great little component that involves stealing one of the boy's shirts, putting it on a dead man before he is buried, digging him up 3 days later and returning the shirt to the cursed person unawares). This is a fairly typical plot so Whitehead makes the focus on the clash of belief systems in the islands, as a local priest attempts to overlay Christian beliefs over vodun and convince the boy (and his mother) that Jesus is more powerful that Damballah. "Sweet Grass" is an interesting record of cultural class, race and gender sensibilities of the time. Cornelius Hansen, a lonesome Dutchman in Santa Cruz, shows mild interest (not even a dalliance, just a discussion interaction!) with a beautiful native girl instead of the "suitable" and expected Caucasian landholder's daughter. When he decides to marry the landholder's daughter anyway, the native girl and her mother use sympathetic magic (a voodoo doll) to torture Hansen, until his new wife demands that it stops. There's all kinds of cultural stuff that can be unpacked from this story: caution about sowing one's oats, class reasons for choosing "suitable" wives (they fight for you), and subtle warnings about potential miscegenation. Interesting.
"Jumbee", contrary to what you might expect, is not exactly a "zombie" tale but instead highlights some of the more arcane figures of island folklore as a retired WWI veteran interrogates a local native gentleman about details of certain beliefs. Lafcadio Hearn gets a mention and there is much local flavor of St. Croix captured in this small-scale ghost story (for example, the overwhelming scent of potted tube-roses in the night air - for a pulp writer, Whitehead is fairly controlled with his "atmospherics", giving it to us in the setting - "Sweet Grass" is another example - but rarely "in the moment"). As noted here Hanging Jumbee are a trio of ghastly suspended spectral figures that slowly turn in the air (although they are not, it is specifically noted, figures of the "lynched" dead) and are encountered by the roadside as a death omen. Also, a spectral old woman encountered on a staircase seems to be some kind of witch/were-dog. Again, interesting.
"The Tree-Man", one Silvio Fabricius, is a worker on a Virgin Island plantation who has been given the task of tending to a sacred tree (the imported Dahomeyans workers having brought their obayi with them). But things go awry when the local Plantation owner fails to see the folkloric import of such a function and, of course (in classic fable structure), the protected tree is "the best one on the property" . Whitehead does a great job (for a religious Christian, and given his limited cultural assumptions of the time, writing about a culture not his own and recording attitudes and events from long in his past) of attempting to explain that the imported animism of the Dahomeyans is neither "stupid" nor "evil". This is a very straight-ahead story (almost exactly what you think will occur, occurs) but I found it surprisingly pleasant nonetheless.
Interestingly, Whitehead has an occasional thread of proto-"body horror" running through his oeuvre. "The Lips" makes use of the same threat featured in Edward Lucas White's notable (and notorious) African curse story "Lukundoo" (here the curse is rendered l'kundu). The skipper of a slave ship, bitten on the neck by one of his abused charges, finds the wound beginning to mutate in unexpected ways. The manifestation of the curse is just as disgusting (and, yes, racially charged) as it is in the White tale, but perhaps dialed just a smidgen back in grotesqueness. “Passing of a God” treats native religious beliefs (vodun, in this case) with some respect (outside of the usual “it's meant to be respected simply to visit a curse on the iconoclast that busts the taboo” storytelling device), and so racial relations percolate vaguely in the background as well. Here we have a Whitehead body-horror piece poised between the poles of magical belief and scientific reasoning, this time involving cancer theory of the time (those familiar with E.F. Benson's “Caterpillars” may see a resemblance as well). Finally in this vein is "Cassius" which I found to be the most memorable thing I read here, a strange mash-up of ideas from Stephen King's THE DARK HALF, the film BASKET CASE and Richard Matheson's short story "Prey", but preceding all of them. A servant, Brutus, undergoes some minor surgery, then finds himself plagued by a miniature savage attacker (there's a very powerful and creepy image of the creature ritually dancing besides the sleeping man before it attacks) that seems to dwell in a tiny hive/hut in the garden. Interestingly, there are no supernatural elements in this story and while Whitehead can be faulted for extending the tale a bit too long with his rationalizing explanations, it is also chock a block with intriguing ideas (Brutus was baptized, so what does that imply for the creature?) and impressively grotesque in its own way. "Sea Change" (originally published in WEIRD TALES) is a pleasantly surprising find. A young man and his new wife, on their honeymoon voyage, are cast adrift on a desert island. But the man has a dark secret - in his childhood he had suffered a glandular deficiency that had reduced him to a monstrous and imbecilic state of cretinism, but which was eventually reversed through daily doses of thyroid medication which he has continued to take daily for his entire life. And now, here he is stuck in paradise with 40 natives, abundant food and water, but only 8 more doses - and a trading ship due in a year...or two. Can he swim the distance to the wrecked ship and dive for the larger store of medicine in his cabin, which should keep him safe until rescue? What is presented as a challenge driven by desperation, something like an adventure story with macabre overtones, resolves itself into an unexpectedly positive piece about overcoming fear and the exercise of free-will. I liked it!
A slight mention should be made of Whitehead's "series character", Gerald Canevin. I put that in quotes because Canevin isn't much of a character (well, maybe that's harsh) and his adventures aren't much of a series, just things that happen to him or people he knows. Canevin is a useful, ambulatory story frame, a guy for people to tell their stories to. He does have some characteristics and back history, but spends a good majority of almost every narrative off-stage, listening or giving us a tidbit of information to provide context, although every once in a while he's involved in a plot directly. An odd duck. For example, take "The Chadbourne Episode" which involves Canevin finding out that his family summer home in Connecticut, which he rents during the season as he's off in the West Indies, has been occupied by some mysterious Persians who intrigued the town with their mysterious, "foreign" ways before returning home at the end of the season. Except they seem to have left something nasty behind, which haunts the cemetery, kills local livestock and pets, and now seems to have preyed on a child. It's an effective little monster story (essentially just retelling Edward Lucas White's Middle-Eastern monster yarn "Amina" but taking up the challenge posed at the end of that story by setting it in New England), and Canevin gets to walk into the ending conflict and act as a violence-bearing arbiter of goodness and light.
And that's it. When and if this books turns up on my reading list again, I'll expand this review.
December 11, 2012
I can't thank Wordsworth enough for issuing this tremendous series of classic horror, supernatural and what not and Whitehead, an author not terribly well known out of the genre, is one reason for thanking them more.
This is a tremendous collection of stories from the colonial period. Of course it has it's 'colonial' moments but the description of relations between the white man and the natives (can I say that any more?)is mostly extremely sensitive and best summarized by the almost consistent portrayal of the mixed races as being judged only on whether they are ethically decent or not - and mostly the natives are decent and portrayed as gentlemen in the sense that Whitehead thought of a gentleman as a man with moral standards and sound ethics. Voodoo is accepted as an alternative system - clearly in Whitehead's view not a valid system as compared to Christianity but then what can one expect of the times.
There is only one story where this falls down and when it does it falls down badly - the torture of a black witch doctor is portrayed with grim realism. It is not the torture itself - this is a stock feature of many horror tales - it is the acceptance that although extreme the punishment was justifiable. At this point I felt physically and spiritually sick - that aside, the collection is a tremendous body of work in a very well edited edition.
This is a tremendous collection of stories from the colonial period. Of course it has it's 'colonial' moments but the description of relations between the white man and the natives (can I say that any more?)is mostly extremely sensitive and best summarized by the almost consistent portrayal of the mixed races as being judged only on whether they are ethically decent or not - and mostly the natives are decent and portrayed as gentlemen in the sense that Whitehead thought of a gentleman as a man with moral standards and sound ethics. Voodoo is accepted as an alternative system - clearly in Whitehead's view not a valid system as compared to Christianity but then what can one expect of the times.
There is only one story where this falls down and when it does it falls down badly - the torture of a black witch doctor is portrayed with grim realism. It is not the torture itself - this is a stock feature of many horror tales - it is the acceptance that although extreme the punishment was justifiable. At this point I felt physically and spiritually sick - that aside, the collection is a tremendous body of work in a very well edited edition.
January 4, 2018
till now i have finished nearly three quarters of it and been amused all the way. this book is literally a time travelling encyclopedia of metaphysics.
April 22, 2016
Well huh. For stories primarily about Caribbean and West Indies voodoo written by a white man in the 1920s, these are surprisingly... Progressive? They aren't free from racism, for sure. Many of the ideas and terms used would be insensitive now, to say the least. But compared to Lovecraft or Howard, you can tell that Whitehead lived among, cared about, and respected the people he describes.
It also helps that these stories are quite good. While Whitehead's grasp of how voodoo works is maybe not 100% accurate, he is clearly writing from experience.
The characters are more relatable than many of Lovecraft's. They far more resemble Watson of Sherlock Holmes, a reader stand-in, rather than some academic.
The writing is, for the most part, clear and simple. Nothing overly complex, but excellent descriptions.
The antagonists and supernatural forces are interesting and varied as well.
Yeah. It's solid.
It also helps that these stories are quite good. While Whitehead's grasp of how voodoo works is maybe not 100% accurate, he is clearly writing from experience.
The characters are more relatable than many of Lovecraft's. They far more resemble Watson of Sherlock Holmes, a reader stand-in, rather than some academic.
The writing is, for the most part, clear and simple. Nothing overly complex, but excellent descriptions.
The antagonists and supernatural forces are interesting and varied as well.
Yeah. It's solid.
September 21, 2020
Supernatural stories of Voodoo written by an Episcopalian priest who served as the Archdeacon for the Virgin Islands in the West Indies from 1921 to 1929, particularly a man who was a close fried to H.P. Lovecraft a great writer but an inveterate racist, would seem like an open invitation to all sorts of paternalist, colonialist tropes calculated to make the woke reader reach for the matches of cancellation. And, yes, if you look for it, there is stuff here to take offense at - just as future ages will look back at us and shake their heads in disbelief and horror at some of our most unquestioned notions. But Whitehead reveals himself a sympathetic recorder of Voodoo beliefs and customs, as well as the general folkways and culture of the West Indian black population, all descended from slaves. While the culture of the time was segregated, as a clergyman Whitehead had better access to and, all credit to him, greater sympathy with the black population than the vast majority of other white West Indians. The stories also provide something of a snapshot into a culture passing into twilight as the old planter aristocracies decline. The stories themselves are more of the weird tale strain of supernatural writing than out and out horror, although one or two are early precursors of later body horror tropes, with Whitehead proving to be a skilled and restrained writer, rather different from the other pulp fiction writers of his time. All in all, a pleasant and engaging collection of stories.
May 26, 2018
A brilliant collection of stories - most (but not all) set in the West Indies and involving the practice of Voodoo. This writer deserves to be better known.
October 19, 2020
Reviewing longer collections like this is difficult I feel because it's hard to stay consistent over so many stories, every story Henry Whitehead ever published I believe, so that unless you have an already existing affection for the author or that the really good stories overwhelmingly outnumber the ok or even bad stories I think you're most likely not going to grade the collection favorably as a whole.
This was my first introduction to Whitehead and while I thought there were some really good, even great stories in here, the majority of the stories didn't do it for me. I have to stress that the stories I liked, I liked quite a bit. Just not enough to ever read the book again. So it doesn't make the bookcase, and goes to the donation box unfortunately
This was my first introduction to Whitehead and while I thought there were some really good, even great stories in here, the majority of the stories didn't do it for me. I have to stress that the stories I liked, I liked quite a bit. Just not enough to ever read the book again. So it doesn't make the bookcase, and goes to the donation box unfortunately
July 27, 2017
it took 4 months to finish it !
it was boring a little, ok that's a lie a lot boring, in some stories I wanted to rip the pages to skip the unwanted details !!!
the good ones were interesting and very open minded. I liked different short stories but the long ones more than 30 pages killed me , but I think that most of the stories are good as a base for paranormal fiction it's like the source.But it needs to be well written and let's face it most of the classics are boring to read, most not all as The monk is one of my favorites ever.
But this collection of vodo tales, not so much
as I said a great source for creativity I can see the potential in most of the stories.
it was boring a little, ok that's a lie a lot boring, in some stories I wanted to rip the pages to skip the unwanted details !!!
the good ones were interesting and very open minded. I liked different short stories but the long ones more than 30 pages killed me , but I think that most of the stories are good as a base for paranormal fiction it's like the source.But it needs to be well written and let's face it most of the classics are boring to read, most not all as The monk is one of my favorites ever.
But this collection of vodo tales, not so much
as I said a great source for creativity I can see the potential in most of the stories.
July 17, 2018
Most of these stories have nothing to do with voodoo, and don't even seem to attempt to be scary. Or entertaining for that matter. There's a story about a guy with a thyroid disease. And a story about a guy that's half orangutan. What those things have to do with ghosts or voodoo or anything of that sort is beyond me.
And while I understand that all the racism in the book is just how it was back then, and not intentional or based on hatred, it is still hard to get through so very much ignorance and racism. It seemed to get worse as the book went on.
And while I understand that all the racism in the book is just how it was back then, and not intentional or based on hatred, it is still hard to get through so very much ignorance and racism. It seemed to get worse as the book went on.
July 2, 2017
This paperback is composed of four collections of Henry Whitehead's tales.
"West India Lights," "Jumbee and Other Voodoo Tales," "The Black Beast and Other Voodoo Tales,"
and a collection of other stories. A friend of Lovecraft, Whitehead also wrote for Weird Tales. Whilst I enjoyed most of the stories in the book, especially the voodoo tales, I found the longer stories slow with too much unnecessary detail. This book is great value and a good read.
"West India Lights," "Jumbee and Other Voodoo Tales," "The Black Beast and Other Voodoo Tales,"
and a collection of other stories. A friend of Lovecraft, Whitehead also wrote for Weird Tales. Whilst I enjoyed most of the stories in the book, especially the voodoo tales, I found the longer stories slow with too much unnecessary detail. This book is great value and a good read.
March 2, 2022
Awful. A lot of the stories are not about voodoo at all, and it is very slow paced.
Currently reading
October 21, 2024The Shadows is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
The Tabernacle is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
West India Lights is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
The Tabernacle is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
West India Lights is also printed in the Big Book of the Masters of Horror
partially-read
October 29, 2015Black Terror - Xtian hocus pocus defeats voodoo mumbo jumbo.
West India Lights -
West India Lights -
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews