![]() Dust-jacket illustration by Lee Brown Coye. | |
Author | Arthur J. Burks |
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Cover artist | Lee Brown Coye |
Language | English |
Genre | Fantasy, Horror |
Publisher | Arkham House |
Publication date | 1966 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 308 |
Black Medicine is a collection of stories by American writer Arthur J. Burks. It was released in 1966 by Arkham House in an edition of 1,952 copies and was the author's first book published by Arkham House. All but one of the stories had originally appeared in the magazine Weird Tales.
The collection contains the following short stories:
E. F. Bleiler described Black Medicine as "a weak collection. The Caribbean stories show racial bias to the point of grotesqueness, and most of the other stories are routine pulp fiction. ["Three Coffins"] has points of interest, and ["Bells of Oceana"] is worth reading for a certain baroque, exuberant overkill of horror."[1]
Set against the backdrop of the United States occupation of Haiti, the title story was the cover story for the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales. "What makes Burks' text interesting," wrote one critic, "is the chaotic mixture of imperial and anti-imperial sentiments." The protagonist specifically calls Haitians "dull and stupid", yet the Haitian characters are depicted as both formidable and sophisticated enough to have founded the society Burks calls "the Black Republic".[2]
Burks was a U.S. Marine who had served in Haiti, and although in his Caribbean stories he "depicts Caribbean people as savage beasts", Raphael Dalleo notes that "Burks's writing is representative of the discourse about the Caribbean that structured how West Indians ... would have been seen by a U.S. audience in the 1920s."[3] "The most pointed hatred and derision," said another critic, "straight from the lexicon of homegrown racism":[4]: 175
Burks's Haiti was a site of sexual excess, gender disorder, and primitive savagery, It was a land characterized bt the effective absence of the family as a basis for social order. In Burks's telling, the grotesque horror of Haiti showed the obvious and urgent need for American rule there.[4]: 178