Publisher's Synopsis
Jumbee and other voodoo tales is a collection of horror stories by American writer Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932). This book brings together eight stories published between 1926 and 1946 in pulp magazines of the time and inspired by the atmosphere of magic, mystery and sacred terror that surrounds the lives of the natives in the Virgin Islands. The matrix of these tales of terror is found in the life of Henry S. Whitehead himself, who in the early 1920s undertook his work as a deacon in the St. Croix region of the Virgin Islands. There he became fascinated by the local customs, voodoo rites and superstitions about zombies and vampires, strongly rooted in West Indian folklore. Most of the stories included in this volume are narrated by Gerard Canervin, a sort of alter ego of Whitehead himself, whom he uses to demonstrate his knowledge and affection for the local supernatural belief system. Canervin, not being an investigator of the occult, investigates and tries to understand the truth of the facts presented to him out of sheer eagerness to know the truth. Let Whitehead take you into the mysterious and macabre world of voodoo, where beasts invade the minds of men and where the lives of the living are haunted by the spirits of the dead.
