Mittelholzer, Edgar

Philadelphia. 1951. Lippincott. 1st American Edition. Good in Worn Dustjacket. 334 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Caribbean Black Guiana. FROM THE PUBLISHER - This is fare to surprise and delight the most exacting reader, a distinguished and original novel by a writer with an unusually fertile mind. In the atmosphere of haunted jungles in British Guiana the author has placed a group of English characters as strange and almost as terrifying as the jungle fauna which he so vividly describes. Dictator of this tropical demi-paradise, the highly eccentric Reverend Gerald Harmston dispenses his home-brewed religion to overawed natives and his own peculiar family. His Sunday sermons are ghost stories, he flogs and chains offenders against his laws, while in the background the memory of Dutch settlers massacred by their Negro slaves lurks as ‘local influence.' Into this bizarre Eden comes a nerve-racked relative from England, who becomes fascinated, as well he might, by the parson's two precocious and uninhibited daughters. There develops a strange and absorbing story, a story like nothing else in current fiction. Full of pagan gaiety and bubbling humor, here is a completely refreshing book. inventory #3191