Disposable Lit Reviews

Avon Books, 1979
224 pp.
ISBN 0-380-44669-3
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Although it’s a novel about voodoo and zombies, it’s not a horror novel, at least not in the sense that we became familiar with in the paperback horror glut of the ’80’s. It might be better to call it an occult-themed adventure-romance. Although the bookstore doesn’t really have a shelf for those, so “horror” is as good a label as any.

Writer Cary Connoway is having an early midlife crisis. He became a celebrity early, thanks to the bestselling nonfiction book about Haitian voodoo that he wrote straight out of college. After a whirlwind couple of years among the Beautiful People in New York, he finds himself in his late twenties with a self-destructed marriage and a bad case of listlessness. So he goes to the Caribbean island of San Marlo to spend some time with old college chum Paul Mackey, whose father had owned a prosperous coffee plantation up until his unlikely death.

Cary’s ostensible purpose in coming is to research the mysterious Culto de Muerte (that’s “Cult of Death” for the bilingually challenged) quietly rumored to exist in the San Marlo hillcountry. But while there, Cary gets embroiled in several other local situations. One is San Marlo politics; the country is run by an iron-fisted dictator, whose local goons were probably (but unprovably) behind Mackey Sr.’s death. Another is both political and personal; Cary falls hopelessly in love with Juana, the daughter of the local tavern-owner, who has also caught the eye of the brutal half-wit brother of the chief local goon.

So when said halfwit starts his pursuit of Juana in ernest right about the time that local government enforcers try to force Paul from his plantation and take it over, Cary and Paul decide it’s about time to take their long-talked-over expedition into the mountains, taking Juana along to get her safely to her aunt’s place on the southern shore of the island. Before Cary gets halfway into the mountains, though, his clinical detachment regarding the Culto de Muerte has started to dissolve, spurred by their dangerous encounters with gaunt, rotten-smelling men on a deadly mission…

Most of the elements of the book are timeworn but serviceable. There’s romance (and sex) in satisfying but not overwhelming proportions; there’s a good deal of adventure, most of it political in flavor, as Cary and Juana fall in with revolutionaries trying to overthrow the dictator Olvida, who uses the zombies of the Cult of Death to maintain control, at least in this part of the country. And naturally, there are the zombies, though not in plentiful quantities; despite their occult origins, they appear mostly as foot soldiers and cannon fodder, formidable mostly by their quantities rather than their status as the living dead.

Anyone seeking true horror probably won’t be satisfied with this one, much less the splatter aficionado. But the voodoo elements are well-researched and organically presented, and the political story provides a strong backdrop without overwhelming the human romance. I’m not surprised that Legion of the Dead hasn’t been reprinted since its original publication (especially as the tastes of the horror audience changed in the post-King era), but it’s probably worth the used bookstore price.

Nathan Shumate