LeBlanc's Novel Is A Cure for Relief from Ordinary Horror

By June Pulliam

07/05/2005

LeBlanc, Deborah. Family Inheritance. New York: Leisure, 2004. 357 p.

I'd pretty much given up on Leisure's line of horror for the past year, and would often pass their books off to other reviewers to handle, since I've felt that as of late, many of their offerings are becoming formulaic. Each is usually 350-400 words long, and lately, I've been finding that the stories are all too predictable for my tastes. Worse still, some of my favorite authors who have been publishing under the Leisure imprint just didn't seem to be trying anymore. But I was intrigued when I saw Deborah LeBlanc's Family Inheritance, as she is a relative newcomer, both to the genre specifically and as a writer. Also, I can't resist novels set in the state where I've spent all of my adult life. If nothing else, they give me a chance to see how badly, or how well, we're represented. I was further intrigued by Family Inheritance as it is about the Cajuns, a much underrepresented group in horror literature.  LeBlanc's novel explores Cajun mythology in an original way, and Family Inheritance put me in mind of Robert J. Conley's excellent novel Brass, which similarly explores the mythological figures of Cherokee culture.

On the bayous of South Louisiana, a pregnant woman visits a gris gris man on a whim, partly believing that he can use his alleged powers to tell her if she's carrying a boy or a girl. But something goes horribly wrong, nearly causing her a miscarriage.  Three and a half decades pass.  In the swamps lives Eli, a Cajun healer, not a traiteur, similar to the curandaros of Latin culture who heal with prayers, but a rausant, someone more powerful that the traiteur since he or she actually has a supernatural power to heal.  The difference between the power of the traiteur and Eli's own, more extraordinary gift is explained to him thus: the former heals small ailments through requesting divine intervention, while the rausant is the prayer.  But Eli's gift comes with a terrible price. Those he heals are possessed by demons, and when he delivers his supplicants from their suffering, the demons rage in his own body. Needless to say, being a sort of spiritual toxic waste dump has aged young Eli tremendously.  And Eli knows that he must leave the swamp that's been his home all his life when he heals a final patient and sees what's troubling the man: Maikana, a death's head with a vertical mouth who is the spirit of insanity and destruction. Since Maikana has no physical body of his own, he must possess humans to completely accomplish his will, causing them to injure themselves and others. This vision leads Eli to have another, where he sees an unknown woman he must find if he is to prevent Maikana from having too much control on earth.

In Memphis is a Cajun woman whose life is supposedly quite removed from bayou superstitions. Jessica LeJeune has just been promoted to the top level of leadership within a small plastics firm, and she's married to a software engineer. But Jessica too has a special gift that she keeps hidden from everyone. She too can heal with the touch. When her son suffers from a headache, she sits at his side and is able to literally draw out the pain with a touch of her thumb between his eyes. Jessica is called back to her Louisiana roots when her younger brother is unexpectedly committed to a mental health facility after wandering around nude and claiming to hear strange voices that compel him to do terrible things. Jessica must see her brother so she can heal him in a way that Thoarzine and Prozac can't. Meanwhile, Eli must find Jessica so that he can help her realize her full power and stop Maikana in time.

LeBlanc's novel is original in that it explores some little known aspects of Cajun culture, including folk healers. She also represents a culture that is greatly influenced by the nearby Creole culture of New Orleans. Many people mistakenly believe that Cajun and Creole are the same thing. In fact, Cajun culture is more rural, and more white, centered in the bayous of South Louisiana, as well as the wet prairies of the coast. Creole culture is urban and African-American and Afro-Caribbean, centered in New Orleans. Still, the two cultures often overlap. Gris gris is more commonly known as a protective charm made by a practitioner of Voodoo. Yet the gris gris man takes some of his beliefs from Voodoo, which is itself a synthesis of Roman Catholicism and the Dahome pantheon. I also appreciated that her Cajun characters didn't become a sort of exoticized Others the way non WASPS become in so much literature. I recently had the displeasure of reading a Civil War novel that did for Southern white speech what Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind did for African-American speech in that it created a grotesque and offensive parody of English that is barely comprehensible to the "literate" world. LeBlanc's Cajun French, appropriately, is rather different from the language spoken in France, or taught in contemporary French classrooms.

Also enjoyable is her representation of the supernatural. Maikana and those who employ white magic to stop him aren't some overdrawn figures who strain credulity. Instead, the supernatural is something beyond the natural, but not necessarily seen, and often something that can be explained rationally as well. Todd's erratic behavior, due to his possession by Maikana, is also consistent with the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. And Jessica's and Eli's powers to heal can also be explained through what is currently "fuzzy" rational logic in that the ability to cure isn't a simple matter of one substance reacting against another, but rather, far more subtle and complex. This sort of subtle horror, combined with an intricate story, makes for an excellent novel.