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Repost: Iroquois Supernatural

[In honor of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, here is a repost of something I wrote a few years back. I am still very much learning about what is acceptable and what is not for a non-indigenous person to include in his fiction, but Bastine and Winfield’s guidance keeps me, I think, on the right track.]

I have great friends. One of them recently found a copy of Iroquois Supernatural: Talking Animals and Medicine People by Michael Bastine and Mason Winfield at a yard sale and was kind enough to pick it up for me as a gift. Bastine is an Algonquin healer and elder. Winfield is a European American who describes himself as a “supernatural historian.”

This is a really neat, informative book. It is chock-full of fascinating tales, keen historical and cultural insights, and a pervasive sense of respect for the Iroquois culture(s) as a whole. I’m mentioning it not to provide a thorough review. My review can be summed up thusly: If you’re the sort of person who is interested in Native American cultures and particularly Native American mythology and folklore, get this book!

I’m bringing this book up, rather, for the guidance it may provide for writers wanting to handle mythological material from outside their culture with reverence and sensitivity. This is a topic that has recently come up in an article at Fantasy Faction by Brian O’Sullivan with respect to Celtic, and particularly Irish cultural artifacts. (You can also read my observations.)

As when I wrote about the uproar over J. K. Rowling’s handling of Native American mythology, I still believe that there are situations where leaving elements of Native American or African mythology out of a story can be more colonialistic than including them. I’m thinking particularly of stories in the contemporary fantasy genre that are set in North America—which happens to be what I write. Populating North America with unicorns and griffins rather than naked bears and great horned serpents strikes me as a lazy and Euro-centric way to tell a story.

Still, the challenge remains to handle these cultural artifacts with care and not treat them as mere commodities. Here is where Bastine and Winfield’s concerns in writing Iroquois Supernatural intersect with my own admittedly different concerns. First and most basically, writers who want to include these kinds of cultural artifacts need to read lots of books like this one, written from a clearly sympathetic viewpoint.

Second, the authors draw a distinction between what they classify as “the sacred” and “the spooky.” This is a distinction that especially writers from outside a given culture need to keep in mind. In the introduction, they write:

Figuring out what to include in this book has been tricky. Where do you draw the line between miracle and magic? Between religion and spirituality? Between the sacred and the merely spooky? This book doesn’t try to choose. How could anyone? (p. 2)

But then they proceed to explain their preference for the spooky over the sacred:

All religions are at heart supernatural. Throughout history most societies have had both a mainstream supernaturalism and others that are looked upon with more suspicion. The “out” supernaturalism is often that of a less advantaged group within the major society. What the mainstream calls “sacred” is its supernaturalism; terms like “witchcraft” are applied to the others. Someone’s ceiling is another’s floor, and one culture’s God is another’s Devil. To someone from Mars, what could be the objective difference? (p. 2)

This comment reminds me of the privileged place Judeo-Christian supernaturalism has in my own culture. Perhaps it will remind you of something else in your own frame of reference. But the writers go on to admit that within Iroquois society itself there are distinctions between the sacred and the spooky. They conclude,

This book is not about the sacred traditions of the Iroquois. It is a profile of the supernaturalism external to the religious material recognized as truly sacred. This is a book largely about the “out” stuff: witches, curses, supernatural beings, powerful places, and ghosts. (p. 3)

Even so, the authors admit that it isn’t always easy to draw firm lines between sacred and spooky. The fact that one of the authors is a practicing traditional healer within a neighboring Native American community is bound to help in this regard! Later on, we hear Winfield explaining further about their approach to this cultural material:

This is not a book about Iroquois religion or anything else we knew was sacred enough to be sensitive. Not only is that not our purpose, but, as a Mohawk friend said recently to me, “If it’s sacred, you don’t know it.” And coauthor Michael Bastine would not reveal it. (p. 22)

So perhaps we can isolate the following touchstones as the beginning of an approach to including cultural material from marginalized or minority groups within our society:

  • Aim for the spooky, not the sacred. Frankly, I’m not interested in writing philosophical or theological treatises on the spirituality of marginalized peoples. (I will admit to a certain interest in reading such studies.) But I love stories about ghosts, monsters, trickster figures, or what have you. As Bastine and Winfield themselves note numerous times, these sorts of things are common to every culture. That suggests to me that, with suitable awareness, writers can fruitfully explore them. If something gets too close to the lived faith commitments of others, however, I tend to want to shy away from it in terms of worldbuilding and storytelling,
  • If it is sacred enough to be sensitive, leave it out. I’m well aware that one reaches a point of sensitivity sooner in some cultures than others, and with different topics in some cultures than in others. Still, is there a better place to start?
  • Strive to understand as much about the culture as a whole as possible. I don’t want to add a cultural element to a story without a firm grasp of how that element relates to others in its “native” environment. Understanding the ins and outs of a culture and its history is a great inoculation against a grab-bag approach.

Do you think it’s possible for writers to handle other world cultures with sensitivity? When have you seen a writer handle well the artifacts of a culture to which he or she was an outsider?

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Musings on the Ecology of Vampires

So I’ve been putting some ideas about vampires together for my next novel, tentatively titled Dead of Night. And as usual, I’ve gone way overboard with the worldbuilding. I’m curious how many vampires a given human population could support? The answer depends on how often they feed and how much they want to remain hidden from the world.

Murder Rates and the Masquerade

Let’s start with staying hidden. To do that, the vampire(s) would have to keep their kills below a certain threshold—or at least be diligent in hiding the bodies. Too many unexplained murders will raise alarms. So the first thing to consider is how many murders is too many, from the vampiric point of view?

To answer that question, we need to find the annual homicide rate in a given locale. In large US cities, the average is about 5.5 per 100,000, but there is great variation. In places like Baltimore or Memphis, the rate is much higher. In Provo, Utah it is much lower. But what matters isn’t how many murders take place in a given year but how many go unsolved. You can probably find a breakdown of this online, but the bottom line is that roughly one-third of all homicides remain unsolved in the US. Maybe we can arbitrarily say that a vampire population that feeds at only half of this rate—one-sixth of the local homicide rate—will be in an ideal situation to remain undetected.

Mind you, I’m not assuming that every last vampire kill gets investigated by the police. I expect most of the time vampires take pains to hide or destroy the bodies and perhaps use a number of other strategies to reduce their ecological footprint: drinking from living donors (willing or unwilling), feeding on animals, raiding blood banks, etc. Still, one-sixth of the local homicide rate at least gives me a place to start.

By the way, you can find crime statistics for the US at the FBI’s website. Here’s a link to the 2019 data arranged by metropolitan statistical area. Beware, however, that some metro areas did not report data this year. (Looking at you, New York and Chicago!) If you back a few years, though, you’ll find what you need.

This is going to be a very small number: smaller than seems to be the case in most vampire-related fiction. So we can imagine that most of the time, a vampire population exceed this ideal. The more vampires, the more likely one of them is going to make a mistake and break the masquerade beyond repair. My guess is that 25 times the ideal threshold is the point at which the jig is up. I have no convincing reason for this number; it just suits the needs of the story I’m spinning! It does, however, seem to produce reasonable and fictionally satisfying results.

With those two numbers in mind, we can describe a number of different scenarios for vampiric activity:

• Ironclad Masquerade. At this threshold, the masquerade is virtually impenetrable. This represents the absolute safety threshold, where the vampire’s yearly kill rate falls below half of the total number of unsolved murders in a given area.

• Strong Masquerade. This threshold is arbitrarily set about 3 times the ironclad threshold (cube root of 25). The masquerade is robust enough to handle an occasional misstep without completely unraveling. Spikes in vampiric activity can still upset the balance, however. Any alpha vampires in the area will take forceful measures to preserve the masquerade.

• Moderate Masquerade. This threshold is arbitrarily set at about 8.5 times the ironclad threshold (square of the cube root of 25). The masquerade generally holds as long as everyone agrees not to do anything foolish. Mistakes are inevitably made, though, and there may be repercussions, especially if the vampires don’t have powerful connections, etc. Law enforcement officers and others in authority may know that something is amiss even if they don’t know what. Outsiders at best scratch the surface of the truth.

• Weak Masquerade: This threshold is arbitrarily set at 25 times the ironclad threshold. At this level, the presence of vampires is definitely felt. Many locals are in denial about what is going on, but the authorities know that something is amiss and strongly suspect the paranormal. This is the situation that seems to be depicted in Sunnydale, California in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (though the Sunnydale numbers are beyond explanation!)

[Aside: Brian Thomas, a real-live ecological scientist has actually run the numbers for the Buffyverse and finds that ~36,000 humans [Sunnydale’s population is 38,500] per 18 vampires is actually a sustainable figure. His analysis doesn’t account for secrecy, however. On the African savanna, the antelopes know all about the dangers of lions; in Sunnydale, people may whisper about the creatures that go bump in the night, but few people know anything for sure.]

• Broken Masquerade: Once the vampire population rises over 25 times the ironclad threshold, people definitely know that something sinister is afoot. This predator-to-prey ratio might describe, for example, a remote village that is actively being terrorized by one or more vampires, such as the peasants around Dracula’s castle in Transylvania.

Feeding Strategies

So now we can describe the thresholds of secrecy that a vampire population might cross. But how quickly do they cross them? Folklore and fiction imagine vampires feeding at different rates. We won’t know how many vampires can exist within a given “masquerade” scenario without considering how much blood they need to consume. Once again, we can describe a number of different scenarios based on what I call the VPV rate: the number of victims per vampire per year.

• Parasitic Feeders (VPV <1). If a vampire needs a pint of blood per month, it can cultivate about three willing donors and none of them need die. (A healthy adult can safely give a pint of blood every two to three months.) More people means the vampire can live in secrecy in a larger population. At this feeding rate, even a very small population can sustain a single vampire. Whether or not it is discovered is more a matter of the creature’s intelligence than population size.

• Light Feeders (VPV 2.5). Some vampires feed only once every four to six months and fall into a state of torpor between feedings. A single light-feeding vampire will be responsible for two or three mysterious deaths or missing persons per year, possibly an inconsequential loss in a large enough community.

Cold-blooded predators such as snakes or crocodiles often feed at this rate, and it is likely the same for at least some vampires. Note, however, that a vampire that is particularly active will feed more often and thus potentially draw more attention to itself.

Most vampire types that live in remote places and prey on lone travelers feed at this rate, and those that find themselves in sparsely populated areas can subsist at this level, at least in the short term.

• Average Feeders (VPV 12). This rate splits the difference between “reptilian” model of the light feeders and the “mammalian” model of the heavy feeders described below, assuming vampires must feed about once per month. If more than one kind of vampire exist in a given locale, this rate is probably a fair estimate of the overall VPV level.

Most vampires that don’t fall into torpor between feedings but rather remain active all the time probably feed at this rate. It’s not a bad estimation for “generic” vampires.

• Heavy Feeders (VPV 52). This rate assumes a vampire has to feed once per week or thereabouts. Large warm-blooded predators such as lions usually feed at this rate, gorging themselves and then resting between kills. Only the most voracious vampires feed at this rate.

Example: The Vampires of Detroit

Here’s how this might work out in practice. Since I grew up in southeastern Michigan, let’s use it the Detroit metro area as an example. According to the FBI data linked above, greater Detroit has a population of 4.32 million people and a homicide rate of 8.4 per 100,000. In absolute numbers, that’s nearly 363 homicides per year.

This lets us calculate an ironclad masquerade threshold at one-sixth of that number or about 60 vampire kills. Remember: this number represents half the number of unsolved homicides in the area.

Now we have to compare that number to the feeding rate of our vampires. Let’s keep it simple and say the “average” VPV of 12 is accurate. If so, then we can predict how many vampires will living in the greater Detroit area at the various population thresholds described above:

Up to 6 vampires can exist here with an ironclad masquerade
7–17 vampires can exist here with a strong masquerade
18–51 vampires can exist here with a moderate masquerade
52–151 vampires can exist here with a weak masquerade
152 or more vampires can exist here with a broken masquerade

If I wanted, at this point I could fiddle around with the VPV to fine-tune my results. For example, I could raise or lower the VPV to better reflect how vampires work in my (or anyone else’s) fictional world.

Anyway, does this sound reasonable to you? How would your own favorite vampire fiction mesh with my analysis? What variables might you shift?

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Fantasy Kindreds of Saynim: Giants and Ogres

Giants and ogres are found in practically every culture in the world. If you discount magically adept creatures like the frost and fire giants of Norse mythology (which I think are better accounted for as trolls), they are almost always savage, backward, and even cannibalistic. Their defining characteristics are incredible size and brutish demeanor. They aren’t truly members of Saynim society, but are sometimes pressed into service by a powerful master.

As I envision them, these beings all share a common ancestor in Homo erectus soloensis, a hominin from Indonesia that is a late variant of Homo erectus with a larger cranial capacity and an unusually advanced culture compared to other erectus subspecies. Giants and ogres share certain physiological features with soloensis, including:

  • A have a wide, flat face with thick bones, heavy brow ridges, and large teeth. Their foreheads are shallow, sloping back from the brow ridges.
  • A brain case is more elongated from front to back and less spherical than that of H. sapiens.
  • Limb bones that are indistinguishable from modern H. sapiens.
  • Differences in the upper respiratory tract, especially the mechanisms of breathing control, that result in a different approach to language. Generally speaking, these beings are not capable of uttering long sentences. Nor can they vary vocal intensity, pitch, or tone to the same degree that humans do. They are thus generally soft-spoken individuals whose voices don’t always convey emotion in ways that humans can decipher.

GIANT (Homo giganticus)

Giants range from 9–14 feet tall and are usually brutish and non-magical—although they may still have great resistance to magic being performed upon them. Apart from a far more robust, dense bone structure to anchor their impressive musculature, giants are anatomically much like humans, only larger.

To a greater or lesser extent, all large hominins (8’ or taller: mainly giants, ogres, and the largest trolls) share the same adaptations to extreme size. Working from the bottom up, one might mention the following:

• Short, stubby feet with a distinct leg structure. Long, plantigrade feet like a human’s prove inefficient for larger bodies. For hominins in the 7–10’ range, the changes to leg structure are minimal, but they become more pronounced as size increases.

Like elephants, the largest hominins have stubby feet that create a more columnar lower-leg structure that is not employed in lift and propulsion but rather is ideal for supporting their terrific weight.

This adaptation has several effects on limb structure and locomotion. The foot musculature (anchored to the shin) is reduced, lowering the overall weight of the limb and thus making movement more efficient. This structure also decreases foot mobility, however, limiting stride length and overall gracility. Some of these effects are countered by the elongated thigh region, which can swing the shortened lower leg over great distances with every step.

• Shorter, thicker legs. Compared to an average human, in which leg length is approximately half of total height, legs of the largest hominins are somewhat shorter. In ogres and large trolls, leg length is roughly 0.47–0.48 total body length. In true giants, leg length is roughly 0.45–0.46 total body length.

Despite their shorter legs, large humanoids have normally proportioned arms (0.34–0.35 body length), leading to a relatively higher intermembral index (forelimb/hindlimb x 100). A normal human has an intermembral index of 68–70; Australopithecus had an index of about 88; chimpanzees, about 106. By comparison, ogres and large trolls have an index of 71–74, while true giants have an index of 74–78.

• Maximized bone strength and stiffness with minimized bone mass and volume. Like birds, giant bones have greater density than normal mammalian bones, providing strong, stiff, but relatively lightweight support.

• A body frame that is wider at the hip than the chest. This puts more of the giant’s muscle mass in its lower limbs where it is most needed for locomotion.

• A higher overall percentage of muscle tissue. Giants are more robustly built than a normal human that has merely been scaled up to incredible height. This is a necessary adaptation to be able to function at all.

• A larger and more efficient heart and circulatory system. This is necessary to bring oxygen to every part of the giant’s enormous body in an efficient manner.

• A relatively smaller head. All animals tend to show a disproportionate reduction in skull length with respect to body mass. The same is true of giant hominins: the larger ones generally have proportionally smaller heads than the smaller ones.

As sizes rise above 10’ or so, certain weaknesses also come into play:

• Bone weakness. Giant bones are stronger than those of humans but must move around far more weight proportionally. By way of comparison, elephants have been known to break bones simply from tripping and falling over. The same can happen to giants.

• Slowness. Giants are unable to run—that is, to lift both feet off the ground at the same time—without incurring serious trauma. Their long strides make them capable of surprising speed at a leisurely gait, however. Giants can “speed-walk” at about 16 miles per hour for short bursts.

OGRE (Homo atrox)

Ogres are the only hominins to regularly prey upon other hominins. They are at least human-sized and often quite a bit larger—though not as large as true giants. They are distinguished from the other hominin species by their animalistic nature.

The tallest ogres range from 8–11 feet tall. They are neither magically potent nor overly intelligent, although most can use glamour on an instinctive level to alter their appearance, and some may have a single additional magical talent they can use to their advantage. Their linguistic capacities are largely the same as that of giants.

Human-sized ogres are sometimes called bogeymen. Distinct subspecies populations can be as small as pygmies or as tall as the Maasai of East Africa. Despite their relative weakness, they can still be a threat to unsupervised human children.

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Obsidian Dawn

One thing I’ve been doing to stave off cabin fever this last month or so is to run an online role-playing game for a few of my friends. In my callow youth, I was an avid RPGer—mainly D&D (white box and then AD&D) and Traveller, but I had a group that was willing to try out different systems.

So for the last few weeks I’ve been running a fairly low-frills online game. No Roll20 or Fantasy Grounds with cool graphics and whatnot. Just a Zoom meeting, occasional screen sharing for important visuals, and everyone on the honor system to be honest about their rolls. I have appreciated the Fate ruleset for a while because it’s a great support for narrative: just what a storyteller needs! For this short-run game, I opted for the streamlined Fate Accelerated variant. Basics are easy enough to grasp, and at pay-what-you-want for the rule book, the price was right!

I proposed a one-or-two shot game (turns out, it was a three-shot!) to some of my friends and soon found that many of them were as tired of being cooped up as I was!

The adventure I’ve been running is called “Obsidian Dawn,” which I pitched as “Law & Order: SVU meets the Dresden Files in the heart of New Orleans.” Our cast of characters took on the roles of members of a secret organization of paranormal investigators. The story begins as they come upon a murder scene and word of a missing person: Lizamar, a teenage girl trafficked into New Orleans from Mexico. Evidence suggests that the traffickers bit off more than they could chew with this girl, who has apparently brutally murdered her captor and escaped—with three different factions of supernatural baddies on her tail.

I don’t want to give you a blow-by-blow summary of the action, but I thought I’d at least share some random reflections.

(1) It’s just like riding a bike…sort of. I haven’t gamed seriously since college, but muscle memory is apparently a thing, even if the muscle in question is your brain. I know I started off pretty rusty, but the beats, the pacing, etc. came back before long, at least to minimum standards. I think the same was true for at least some of the gang around the virtual table. The Fate Accelerated system was new to almost everybody, but everybody has had at least one cool moment of great role play. And that’s what has always been the most fun for me, even when I was young and stupid and couldn’t have put it into words.

(2) It was good to be with old friends. The guys in my group run the gamut from a fairly new friend I’ve only ever interacted with online to a couple of high school buddies. These weren’t the first people I ever played D&D with, but they were the group I was with the longest.

(3) We all need something to fill the void. Maybe the void isn’t coronavirus-inspired cabin fever. Maybe it’s just a long week at work or personal worries it would be nice to take a break from. Like many other things, a good RPG session can be therapeutic. As the weeks have gone on, I’ve found myself thinking almost pastorally about the group: what they might be struggling with, how I can do something nice for them by providing them a couple hours’ diversion. If I haven’t been eager to run marathon four-hour gaming sessions (we’d have finished the whole adventure in one such session, or come awfully close), at least partly that’s because I’ve been hesitant to let the experience end too soon.

(4) Story is happening. If I have a philosophy of game-mastering, it’s probably something like: set up a cool dilemma and see what the players do with it. I don’t like to be overly railroad-y, though with a short-term, self-contained adventure scenario, I find I’m doing that a little more than I would prefer in an open-ended campaign. I figure if I can propose an interesting problem and everybody gives it their best, a story might happen. And so far, I think it has! The team has pursued leads, confronted dark forces, come oh-so-close to rescuing Lizamar and/or learning her secrets. Next week, they’ll cross into the Underworld for the big, explody climax of the story, and I think it has the potential to be awesome!

(5) Online gaming is not my thing, but I see how it can work. Some things simply can’t be part of the RPG experience when the players are spread over four different states in two different time zones. Nobody can bring snacks. Nobody really has time to socialize much before or after the game—which is a shame, because I think my old friends would like my new friends, and vice versa. It’s hard, though not impossible, even to look each other in the eye and read how they’re processing the clues and plot points I divulge to them. You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem for somebody as keen on a “theater of the mind” approach as I usually am, but there it is. At the same time, I’ve come to appreciate how this format can work if it’s what you have available.

That has been my experience the past month or so. Are there any online RPGers out there? What has been your experience? What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about gaming online for the first time?

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Written by Zombies: A Primer on the Passive Voice

Permit me a small rant, which I will preface by saying that I don’t know a lot about writing, but I am confident that I know some things about grammar.

People who do know about writing warn writers against overuse of the passive voice. I agree. Though the passive voice has its place, it is often overused, especially in formal, academic writing.

My rant is this: A lot of people who warn against overuse of the passive voice have a devil of a time recognizing it when they see it. Instead, they’re seeing something else, something deceptively similar in form, and they’re calling it “passive voice” when it is not.

We’re going to have to unpack some terms here, and I apologize beforehand that it might be rough going. I’ll try to stick to the basics.

The first term: VOICE. I’m not talking about “authorial voice” or even finding a character’s “voice.” In grammatical terms, voice has to do with how the subject of a verb is related to the verb itself. In English, there are basically two choices:

• Active Voice is when the subject is performing the action of the verb: “The dog bit me.”
• Passive Voice is when the subject is receiving the action of the verb: “I was bitten by the dog.”

That’s it. That’s what the passive voice is, no more and no less. You don’t even need the “by the dog” part. A passive voice construction doesn’t have to tell you who is doing something, only who or what it is being done to: “I was robbed!” “Have you ever been kissed?” “Our country is built on laws.”

Even so, an easy test for whether or not you’re dealing with a passive voice construction is whether you can add “by zombies” and the sentence makes sense. “I was robbed by zombies!” “Have you ever been kissed by zombies?” “Our country is built on laws…erm, by zombies.”

So let’s take one more example: “Fred was walking down the street.” Is that passive voice? Let’s find out: “Fred was walking down the street by zombies.” Nope. Because we already know who is performing the action of the verb. It’s Fred. Fred is the one walking. And yet, there are plenty of good, smart, educated people—many of whom write for a living—who’ll see that sentence and say, “You shouldn’t use the passive voice. Change it to ‘Fred walked.'”

And that leads us to the next term.

Second term: ASPECT. Aspect has to do not with the relationship of subjects to verbs but with how the speaker or writer wants you to imagine the action of the verb taking place. Once again, in English, we basically have two options:

• Simple Aspect simply announces that the action takes place or has taken place: “The dog bit me.”
• Continuous Aspect asks us to imagine the action as taking place repeatedly or over a course of time: “The dog was biting me.”

(There is also the emphatic mood—”The dog did bite me”—but let’s put that to one side for now.)

So, “Fred was walking down the street.” Passive voice? Nope. Not even close. Continuous aspect? There you go! Mind you, I’m not arguing that that sentence is stellar prose. Continuous aspect can also be overused, and often is. But when you’re critiquing someone’s writing, it’s actually kind of helpful to critique the right thing.

What trips a lot of people up is that these two verb forms are constructed from some of the same building blocks. Both use a form of the verb “to be” (is, was, are, etc.) plus a participle. But what kind of participle makes all the difference:

• “To be” + a past participle (usually ends in -ed) = passive voice
• “To be” + a present participle (ends in -ing) = continuous aspect.

Bottom line: Neither passive voice nor continuous aspect are grammatical errors, and there are times when both are actually preferable to active voice or simple aspect, respectively. But they should never be the default. When in doubt, shy away from using these forms.

I’ll leave you with this nice tutorial on How to Avoid Using the Passive Voice. Happy writing!

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Vampire Vednesdays: Vampire Corpse

It is not entirely accurate to say that there are no vampire legends among Native Americans, but the few creatures native to North America that might (perhaps generously) classify as “vampires” are quite a bit different from their European cousins.

Among the Iroquois, for example, there is a monster sometimes called a “vampire corpse,” “vampire skeleton,” or “cannibal corpse.” Obviously, the name is a product of cultural cross-pollination with European settlers. In the Seneca language, the creature is called a tcis’gä, which simply means “corpse” or “skeleton.” Its nature is in some ways comparable to a European vampire, in other ways more like the zombie of popular culture. It has an emaciated, skeletal body and variety of magical powers. They are repelled, however, by redbud branches.

A vampire corpse can be a simple dead body that something evil has overtaken. Or, it could be the body of a sorcerer so full of its own magical potency that it endures after physical death. In either case, it is a ravenous undead creature with a frightening appearance and a hunger for human flesh.

These creatures’ bestial demeanor and cadaverous appearance make it impossible for them to impersonate normal human beings. They might lie in wait in their coffins in remote huts or cabins, preying upon lost travelers who hope to spend the night under their shelter.

A similar creature, the skudakumooch or “ghost witch,” is associated with the Wabanaki cultures of the Maritime Provinces and adjacent areas.

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Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-García

I’m going to cut right to the chase. Go buy this book, now. You won’t regret it.

Still here? Then allow me to explain. Gods of Jade and Shadow is a delight. It’s the story of Casiopea Tun, an eighteen-year-old from Yucatán in 1927. On her mother’s side, she’s from an influential local family, the quintessential big fishes in a small pond. But on her father’s side, she’s of Maya heritage and therefore looked down upon by her more fair-skinned cousins. She dreams of one day escaping her little village and seeing the wider world, out from under the oppressive thumb of her Grandfather and her spiteful cousin Martín.

One day, an encounter with a Maya god of death promises to make her dreams come true—if it doesn’t kill her first. She leaves her village on a trek across Mexico in the company of this dark Lord of Xibalba, the Maya underworld, along the way meeting numerous other creatures from the indigenous and colonial mythologies of Mexico. The death god, Hun-Kamé, is on a quest to retrieve certain elements stolen from him by his vengeful brother Vucub-Kamé, who now sits on Hun-Kamé’s throne. Once he collects what he has lost, he will be able to challenge his brother. Until then, his existence on this mortal plane is bound to Casiopea’s. The longer he remains in his semi-mortal state, the closer Casiopea comes to her own death.

As she did in Certain Dark Things, Moreno-García masterfully weaves ancient Mesoamerican folklore with modern Mexican sensibilities. Gods of Jade and Shadow reminded me of the Latin American novels I read in my Spanish Literature classes back in college—and that is definitely a good thing! She spins a tale of magical realism as adeptly as did Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luís Borges, or any of the other greats of the twentieth century.

Most important, she makes me care about her characters. By the time you get to the end of the story, you understand why each of them acts as they do. You cheer for the heroes while feeling at least a twinge of pity for the villains. They’re all imminently human—even the gods and monsters.

So if you like contemporary fantasy or magical realism, buy this book.

If you like tender coming-of-age stories, buy this book.

If you love Mexico, its people and its culture, buy this book.

You really won’t be sorry you did.