Forbidden Objects

by Maggie Davis

Bonaventure is not a good place ... the stone houses and the marble ghosts press down....

"i come upon him in the front hall in the ugly
pier glass i use the name Lazarus
he has the fever now and knows it
and has prepared himself for death...."

"In the mirror it watches me...."

Lazarus: he "rose from the dead" off a derelict slave ship to control Georgia plantation blacks with a curious set of forbidden objects, the sticks, drums, and rattles of conjure -- obeah. Does his control -- and his anger -- extend beyond the grave?

Elizabeth Franklin "Frankie" Jefferson: descendant of slaveowners and apparent clairvoyant. Have she and her strange cousin Julian raised the specter of Lazarus, releasing the power of his deadly obeah? Why has Frankie's family started to die?

This is like no other novel of obsession and revenge.

Frankie Jefferson is like no other heroine in American fiction.

Genres: Horror

276 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

aka M. H. Davis, Maggie Daniels, Katherine Deauxville

Maggie Hill was born in Norfolk, Virginia, USA, daughter of George Blair and Dorothy (Mason) Hill. She also writes under the pen names of M. H. Davis, Maggie Davis, Maggie Daniels, and Katherine Deauxville, is the author of over 25 published novels. She is a former feature writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, copywriter for Young & Rubican in New York, and assistant in research to the chairman of the department of psychology at Yale University. She taught three writing courses at Yale, and was a two-time guest writer/artist at the International Cultural center in Hammamet, Tunisia. She has written for the Georgia Review, Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Holiday and Venture magazines. She is the winner of four Reviewer’s Choice Awards and one Lifetime Achievement Award for romantic comedy from Romantic Times Magazine, and received the Silver Pen Award from Affaire de Coeur Magazine. She is also listed in Who's Who 2000.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, the author knows how to write but I missed the story. There were some elements of horror but you could have made much more out of the exotic southern setting. Okay, it was a fluent read but I was expecting more of it.

[Stacia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was not impressed by this horror novel (if it was a horror novel). All of the side details were impressive, but as with so many time travel stories, the end was the beginning all over again. This was particularly frustrating as the individual scenes and plot points were very good. Read if you enjoy unreliable narrators and southern gothics conscious of the horror and burden of slavery.

[Bessie Sullivan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure that I understood this book at all. It went back and forth in time with no warning, even between paragraphs. Still not clear on what it was trying to say.