Conquer by Edward M. Erdelac

Formats: Print, digital, audible

Publisher: Self Published 

Genre:  Historic Horror, Monster, Mystery, Myth and Folklore, Occult, Vampire

Audience: Adult/Mature

Diversity: Black/African-American, Hispanic, Trans, Gay

Takes Place in: Harlem New York, NY, USA

Content Warnings: Animal Death, Body Shaming, Child Abuse, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Gore, Homophobia, Kidnapping, Necrophilia, Oppression, Pedophilia, Physical Abuse, Police Harassment, Racism, Rape/Sexual Assault, Sexual Abuse, Slurs, Transphobia (Highlight to view)

Blurb:

In 1976 Harlem, JOHN CONQUER, P.I. is the cat you call when your hair stands up...the supernatural brother like no other. From the pages of Occult Detective Quarterly, he's calm, he's cool, and now he's collected in CONQUER. From Hoodoo doctors and Voodoo Queens, The cat they call Conquer’s down on the scene! With a dime on his shin and a pocket of tricks, A gun in his coat and an eye for the chicks. Uptown and Downton, Harlem to Brooklyn, Wherever the brothers find trouble is brewin,’ If you’re swept with a broom, or your tracks have been crossed, If your mojo is failin’ and all hope is lost, Call the dude on St. Marks with the shelf fulla books, ‘Cause ain’t no haint or spirit, or evil-eye looks, Conjured by devils, JAMF’s, or The Man, Can stop the black magic Big John’s got on hand!

I received this product for free in return for providing an honest and unbiased review. I received no other compensation. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

Conquer is the story of a Black mystical detective named John Conquer (a reference to John the Conqueror) and a homage to 70’s detective fiction and Blaxploitation films. It’s fun, well written, and full of creepiness, including a fetus monster haunting an abandoned subway station and a man shrunk down and boiled alive in a lava lamp. I greatly enjoyed the book, but like most Blaxploitation, it wasn’t without its problems.

It’s important to point out that Erdelac is a White author writing a Black story (something not uncommon in Blaxploitation). I usually prefer to promote “own voices” books, and stories by cishet White men are a rarity on this blog. After all, folks with privilege do not have the best track record when it comes to writing marginalized groups. As Irish author Kit de Waal said, “Don’t dip your pen in someone else’s blood”. Take American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins and The Help by Kathryn Stockett. They’re both terrible for numerous reasons including, but not limited to: not doing enough research, using the White Savior trope, watering down their narratives to make them palatable for White audiences, cultural appropriation, speaking over marginalized voices, etc. That’s not to say White authors shouldn’t write BIPOC characters at all. Not having any diversity in your story can be equally problematic. It just needs to be done carefully and respectfully. Very, very carefully. Yes, I know that can be a fine line to walk, but if an author can research what kind of crops people were growing in 1429 to make their book more accurate, they can research American Indians and people of color. Besides, that’s what hiring sensitivity readers and using resources like Writing with Color is for. Of course, there’s also the problem of White voices being given preferential treatment by publishers and audiences over BIPOC trying to tell their own stories.

To his credit, Erdelac has done an impressive amount of research to make his book feel authentic. John Conquer wears a dime around his ankle for protection and a mojo hand (another name for a mojo bag) for luck. His name is a reference to High John de Conqueror, a Black folk hero with magical abilities. Conquer also has one of the most accurate representations of Vodou I’ve ever seen in fiction. Hollywood “voo doo” is a pet peeve of mine, so I appreciate Erdelac’s dedication to portraying the religion and loa/lwa (the powerful spirits Vodou  practitioners worship and serve) accurately. He also doesn’t try to portray an idealized version of 1970s NYC. There’s racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and cops and criminals spewing slurs. And while it’s jarring, it does make the story feel more authentic. The police are racist and homophobic and there’s tension between the many communities that make up 1970s New York. John Conquer’s Uncle Silas was disowned by his family for being gay, and when John is asked to solve his murder, he has to confront his own homophobia and transphobia. That doesn’t mean it always works, though. There were definitely a few times I side-eyed and wondered if a certain line really needed to be in there.

My favorite part of the book is Eldelac’s excellent world building. White vampires go up in smoke when exposed to sunlight, while vampires with more melanin are protected from the sun’s rays. Vampirism also halts a corpse’s decay, but all that rot catches up to them when they’re finally killed. Each culture has their own magical practices with distinct rules, and magic doesn’t cross cultural lines. For example, only Vodou practitioners can become zombies, and non-Christian vampires are immune to crosses. Conquer is especially powerful because he’s learned many different traditions and practices, but the catch is that this opens him to a wider variety of spiritual attacks. Street gangs utilize black magic to wage wars with each other. His work is clever, original, and something I could really get into. But…having White authors tell BIPOC stories still feels problematic to me when White authors are still so heavily favored by the publishing industry. I’ve reviewed books by White authors before, but because Conquer is based heavily on Blaxploitation it feels, well, more exploitative than those I’ve reviewed in the past. I’m still going to go ahead and recommend Eldelac’s work because—in the end—it is well written and interesting, but I can also completely understand if some of you want to skip this one.

Grievers by Adrienne Maree Brown

 

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: AK Press

Genre: Apocalypse/Disaster

Audience:  Adult/Mature

Diversity: Black/African-American, Lesbian

Takes Place in: Detroit MI, USA

Content Warnings: Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Illness, Medical Procedures (Highlight to view)

Blurb:

Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. Dune must navigate poverty and the loss of her mother as Detroit’s hospitals, morgues, and graveyards begin to overflow. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.

I received this product for free in return for providing an honest and unbiased review. I received no other compensation. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.

“Grief was an amalgamation of absence narratives layered over each other”

Death positivity is the philosophy that death and grief should be spoken of openly and that treating the subject as taboo does more harm than good. It encourages people to learn about end-of-life care, make plans for their own deaths, be involved in the care of their dead loved ones, and explore their curiosity and feelings surrounding death. In a way, Grievers is a death-positive book. The story explores what it’s like to lose the people you love, care for the dying, prepare for death, and the mourning process. Most horror skims over the death of its characters, their lives nothing more than cheap fodder for the reader’s entertainment. But in Grievers, you feel the weight of every death.

A mysterious illness is sweeping Detroit and killing its Black population. Dubbed “H8”, it leaves its victims frozen in place with grief-stricken faces. A social justice activist named Kama is the first to contract the disease. Unable to afford a hospital, Dune, Kama’s only child, cares for her mother at home by feeding her, changing her, and keeping her as comfortable as she can. Dune, distrustful of the system that failed them, decides to cremate her mother herself when Kama finally passes. Dune’s act of cremating her own mother (although not something I would recommend as it’s neither safe nor legal) is described as “sacred work,” a ritual that allows her to be close to her mother one last time.

Death rituals, whether religious or secular, perform a necessary function in the grieving process. In his research on grieving rituals Michael I. Norton, a professor at Harvard Business School, discovered the following:

“Despite the variance in the form that rituals take… a common psychological mechanism underlies their effectiveness: a restoration of feelings of control that losses impair. Indeed, people who suffer losses often report feeling out of control and actively try to regain control when they feel it slipping away; feeling in control, in turn, is associated with increased well-being, physical health, and coping ability.” [1]

In the story, a group of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners perform grieving rituals believing that this will protect them from H8, a disease, they theorize, that targets the lungs where grief is held. Dune performs grief rituals to help overcome the immense sense of loss she’s experiencing. The first is cremating her mother in her backyard. The second is “telling” her dead father that her mother has passed. The third, and most important, is creating a record of everyone who has fallen ill and marking their locations with pins on her father’s model of Detroit. The last project gives her something to do, a way of combatting her sense of helplessness as the world falls apart around her. After slipping into a deep depression and shutting herself away, collecting data on the infected gives Dune a new sense of purpose and feeling of control. She organizes her data onto index cards and files them away, creating order out of chaos.

The way Brown represents grief is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Dune isolates herself from the world, too depressed to even plan a memorial service for her mother. She physically carries the weight of her grief as she gains weight during her depression. Eventually, Dune finds ways to cope with her grief. In addition to the rituals providing her with a sense of control, Dune also focuses on survival and caring for her elderly grandmother, Mama Vivian. She harvests produce from community gardens and cans them for the winter. She changes, feeds, and sings to her grandmother. She eventually reaches out to one of her mother’s activist friends for emotional support. It’s not always easy. Dune blows up at a volunteer food distributor without really knowing why, other than just needing someone to lash out at. She dips back into a depression when other people she cares about die. But she keeps surviving, and slowly things start to improve. Brown describes the feeling of slowly emerging from a deep depression perfectly: “Dune was beginning to feel aware of her own aliveness again - not quite a desire to live, just a growing, surprising awareness that she was not dead.” While this may not sound like much, it’s still a step forward in Dune’s path to healing and an improvement from the beginning of the story when “the detritus of grief became Dune’s comfort.” As someone who suffers from clinical depression themselves, I can say that just feeling alive again is such a huge step forward. At the same time, her father’s model, now thick with markers, is starting to sprout little green shoots: new life that has started to grow in the basement against all odds.

A year defined by a pandemic and protests, 2020 was especially difficult for Black Americans. Black communities were hit especially hard by Covid-19, and our anger and frustration with a racist system reached a boiling point with the murder of George Floyd by a White police officer. Grievers may be fiction, but it captures the very real feelings of pain and loss the Black community has been feeling recently. The H8 virus is a metaphor for both Covid and the pain caused by racism. “Hate” is literally killing Black people by destroying them emotionally and no one seems to be able to quell the spread of the disease. Like Covid, everyone knows someone who died from the virus. The city seems to shut down overnight as the wealthy flee and hospitals are overwhelmed.

Grievers does not follow a standard three arch story structure. There’s no antagonist to overcome, no climax, or satisfying resolution. If you’re looking for traditional storytelling, then this book isn’t for you. If you want a beautiful, heartbreaking, death-positive horror story that focuses on one woman’s battle with grief and just trying to survive a pandemic that feels all too familiar, I highly recommend Grievers.

 

[1] From the Journal of Experimental Psychology