KAMARANG...Dread and creepiness from first page to last

KAMARANG…Dread and creepiness from first page to last

Feb 18, 2019 News

A review of Michael Jordan’s supernatural novel by Berkley W. Semple

The Caribbean tradition in literature gives short shrift to most genre fiction. There are almost no significant horror novels in the archipelago. The rare exceptions are Elstonbrody and My Bones and My Flute, both by the Guyanese Edgar Mittelholzer and to some degree, The White Witch of Rosehall by the Jamaican Herbert De Lisser. Caribbean novels are almost exclusively, literary fiction, a sure sign of their literariness and ambitions. Kamarang, a new wonderful first novel by the Guyanese journalist Michael Jordan, is unabashedly horror and employs all the vulgar tropes of that genre: death by sex, check; vengeful spirit, check; bad dreams and nightmares, check; the allied lesser tropes of revulsion, disgust, fear, and creepy atmosphere are here as well. This novel sustains a high quotient of dread and creepiness from its first page to its last.
Kamarang defies easy precis but has its precursors in the novels of horror masters Peter Straub and Stephen King, especially King. It resembles most one of King’s recent novels, The Outsider, which also mines established myth for its horror. In that novel, based upon the Mexican folklore of El Cuco, a villainous creature consumes the flesh of his victims, mostly children. While King’s novel resembles a police procedural, with detectives investigating the titular murder of a child, with a supernatural element, Jordan’s novel is more steeped in the supernatural and it is bawdy.
Kamarang mines an Amerindian myth of the Bush Dai Dai, a kind of seductress, Erzulie of the deep woods, a la belle dame sans merci, seductress and death-dealer. “Unease,” used liberally in this text, is a motif of sorts, bespeaks a certain kind of horror not fully comprehended, felt and glimpsed but never perceived in the raw; and it is malignant and dismaying once apprehended, and the truth of it is unbelievable and horrible. The book sustains an endless sense of dread, so palpable in its presence, tactile and terrible, that the reader senses the horror to come, and this is made more terrible because the victim to whom the reader has come to care about, does not, and goes blindly into danger and death.
The novel tells two stories, one in the past and one in the present, circa 1978. Both stories are, with minor deviations, essentially the same: two young men, one in the jungle environs of Kamarang and the other in the city Georgetown, are sexually enthralled to the same woman, a sometimes-pale mysterious creature with a more than voracious sexual appetite. She consumes her men like a female praying mantis. She epitomizes the metaphor that sex is death, but she takes her time. It is a compliment to the author’s prudence that sexual pleasure is not expressed from her point of view, but the victim’s. This Dai Dai doesn’t do it for pleasure. She is aided in her macabre enterprise by two dastardly Duenes, a short man with his feet turned backward with a nasty interest in children. The Dai Dai’s other helper is an old woman, a witchy type who mostly cooks things too taboo to eat.
In the first story, the young man Leon is consumed by the woman who calls herself Lucille. She literally drains him of his substance. In the second story, in the present, she is doing the same to another young man, Michael. She takes her time, morseling his muscle and mind through liberal doses of the old “in-out, in-out.” In pursuit of this woman is Vibert Sealey, who knew Leon in Kamarang and witnessed the boy’s degradation and death at the woman’s hands. Michael Jordan is attentive to the salients of a good horror novel, to the creepiness and dread of it, to the uses of words that indemnify it. The word “slime,” for example is used to describe female sexual secretions and the movement of the villain. The word “shift” is used to describe her supernatural quickness. The novel sustains the reader’s interest by employing a cliffhanger aspect after each chapter. One reads on to find out what happens.
Kamarang is remarkably good for a first novel, ambitious, with well-realized characters with the psychological acuity of a seasoned novelist. It is the work of a mature writer. The novel is frightening, as any successful horror novel should be. The novel is wonderfully paced, moving forward at a fairly good clip. Jordan has imbibed Elmore Leonard’s rule number ten; the novel tries to leave out what the reader tends to skip, thus no long expositions on the mundane, no tedious asides on the esoteric.
Jordan is not a lyrical writer. His prose style is plain and utilitarian. The sentences are short and uncomplicated. Jordan’s métier is his deftly realized characters, Guyanese archetypes yes, but real and recognizable. The ethos of 1970’s Guyana is also fully realized, especially its music, used adroitly in the novel to elevate the horror or suggest mood. Kamarang is a wonderful read. I look forward to reading other novels from Michael Jordan. I hope more people read this wonderful book.
(Berkley W. Semple is the author of several books, including Lamplight Teller, for which he was awarded the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2004; First Book of Poetry category.)
Michael Jordan’s Kamarang is on sale at Austins Book Service. The author can also be contacted for autographed copies, via his mobile number +592 645 2447 or email address [email protected].