Pour One for the Devil
A Gothic Novella
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Very cool.” —Stephen Graham Jones, NYT best-selling author of My Heart is a Chainsaw and The Only Good Indians
When Dr. Van Vierlans receives an invitation from Mrs. Elizabeth Van der Horst to give a lecture at her island mansion off the coast of South Carolina, he doesn't think twice. There’s a generous honorarium, and he relishes the chance to revisit the Sea Islands, where he once studied the Gullah language.
The lavish house he arrives at is strangely out of time. No other historians appear, nor does an audience, as he passes the time chatting in Gullah with the household servants. Just when his suspicions become difficult to ignore, Mrs. Van der Horst plies him with a sumptuous feast that distracts him from her true motives–which may prove more sinister than anything he’s prepared to imagine.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Gullah culture and folk beliefs of South Carolina and Georgia's Sea Islands serve as the foundation for this wobbly contemporary Southern gothic from Van Alst (The Longest Street in the World). Events begin innocently enough when Dr. Van Vierlans, a Native American academic and fiction writer, accepts the invitation of Elizabeth Morganstern, a white plantation owner on Coosaw Island, to read from his work on local shell rings as ancestral sites of power. Though relatively fluent in the Gullah tongue, Van Vierlans proves ill-informed about the history of the Morganstern plantation and how it intertwines with the superstitions of Elizabeth's Gullah servants. Over the course of one booze-soaked evening, Van Vierlans discovers that he has been not so much invited to the island as lured there to play a role in an arcane ritual. Van Alst's colorful descriptions of the setting conjure a fantastic atmosphere that makes the extraordinary seem possible, but several plot threads go underdeveloped, resulting in a whole that feels mashed together from independently conceived ideas. Still, fans of the macabre will enjoy this tale for its unique perspective on an underrepresented culture and its legends.
