Safe Return Doubtful

(Translated from the German by Sinclair Dombrow)

There are four short stories in this collection, and they are all tremendous.
The titular, Blood, or Mamaloi
The White Maiden
Tomato Sauce
and The Spider.

In Mamaloi, Ewers relates the details of a scandalous occurrence involving voodoo by a corrupt, depraved and aging German missionary in Haiti. It is in the format of a letter from the emigre, deliberately intended to scandalise the his reverent relative, containing casual remarks about sexual abuse, including that of young children. The narrator believes his Haitian slave, Adelaide, may be a Voodoo priestess, and there is a harrowing account of a ceremony in which a child is sacrificed and cannibalised at the height of an orgy.

Tomato Sauce is a vivid account of cock and bullfighting atrocities, building up to the main spectacle of two men hacking each other to pieces with knives before a cheering audience, at the forefront of which stands a vampiric English clergyman nicknamed ‘The Pope’.

I’ve only just encountered Ewers, and I am smitten.. Most of his horror writing took place just after the Great War, during which he had spent most of the time in an American Interment Camp, accused of spying, though was never actually tried as such. He is considered a big influence on Lovecraft, and I can see why. His writing is highly original, and experimental in the manner that he was prepared to go places where his contemporaries, and indeed all other writers in the genre, feared to go.

First published in 1930

My score 5 / 5