by Shivanee Ramlochan, Paper Based Blogger

The University of the West Indies Press, 2015.

Welcome to the 2015 Paper Based Advent Book Blog! Say a shivering hello to our Day Seventeen selection: an anthology that’s been a long time coming, brined as it is in the folklore, superstitions and spectral happenings of these multiple-tongued islands — a collection of ghost stories that’s eminently, bloodcurdlingly Caribbean: The Haunted Tropics, edited by Martin Munro.

We, Antillean and archipelagic island-dwellers, are no strangers to our own ghosts. The fifteen offerings in this anthology, spread across the English, French and Spanish-speaking countries of our region, are at their best when they show how closely the living lace fingers with the dead. Whether summoning the vestiges of plantocracy’s permanently bitter legacy, or breaking open classic hairraising fables to flood them with new significances, Munro’s chosen his writers well. Each of them absorbs the haunted consciousness of the islands into their narratives, and presents a grim, sometimes-jocular, often-terrorizing portrait of the monsters living under our beds, beneath our silk cotton trees.

From Guadeloupean Maryse Condé’s “The Obeahman, Obeahed”, which opens the collection, to Trinidadian Keith Jardim’s “The Country of Green Mansions”, which closes it, every story confronts not only otherworldly fear, but perhaps more pressingly, the monsters and mayhems we curate in our own secret hearts. Jardim’s story delves deep into Guyanese river country, tangling erotic explorations with the phantoms of a history-steeped past:

“And suddenly something was there, in the room with him, other than Arianna, who continued sleeping. He could see nothing of it, but felt a weight in the room. The floorboards creaked in the corner behind the mirror, not of a presence moving from one place to another, but stationary, shifting its weight, as if, he imagined, dutifully considering something — maybe him.”

Shani Mootoo’s smart-talking jumbies; Fred D’Aguiar’s reimagined trickster Anansi; Lawrence Scott’s sepia-tinged photographs containing hidden truths: all the ghosts and graveyards in The Haunted Tropics are wearing their best obeah-suited apparel, and they’re looking forward to meeting you.

We recommend it for: those who’ve been longing to greet some duppies and douens, rather than white-sheeted Hallowe’en shriekers in their fiction reading; fans of Madison Smartt Bell; Earl Lovelace, and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw’s full length-works; adherents and acolytes of the Caribbean literary gothic.