On a volcanic island where the dead were believed to return, Lafcadio Hearn set down one of the earliest and most atmospheric accounts of Caribbean revenant belief ever written in English.
Lafcadio Hearn (1850 – 1904), the Greek-born writer and journalist later celebrated for his work on Japan, spent two years in Martinique in the late 1880s. This essay, drawn from Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), records the island's belief in les revenants, the comers-back, the dead who do not stay buried. With a reporter's precision and a poet's ear, Hearn captures the customs, superstitions, and shadowed atmosphere of Creole Martinique, offering a foundational document in the literature of the returning dead.
This edition features:
- A vivid first-hand portrait of Martinique's folk beliefs surrounding the dead and their supposed return
- An essay drawn from Hearn's classic 1890 study of Creole life in the French Antilles
- An early English-language source on West Indian revenant tradition, predating the popular idea of the zombie
- Prose that unites travel reportage, ethnography, and a haunting literary sensibility