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White Bizango
by Stephen Gallagher
introduction by Joe R Lansdale
(PS Publishing, £8/$14, 159 pages, signed, numbered, limited
edition paperback, also available as signed, numbered limited edition
hardback priced £25/$40, published December 2002.)
Review by David Mathew
This remarkable little book is like a  stranger's
suitcase that you have picked up by mistake. From the outside it looks
familiar -- a police procedural, first person tale about American voodoo
-- but once you have opened up the lid, you find that this case is full
of the weird and the wonderful -- and that it has been packed extremely
tightly. It is no less than a joy to unpack the narrative.
John Lafcadio is a cop, called in to a shopping mall to investigate
the disappearance of a child. While chasing the would-be kidnapper,
he is attacked in a most unusual way (in one of the book's three most
chilling scenes) and is left for dead. The problem is, despite the fact
that he can see and hear as usual, he cannot move so much as an eyelid:
he's been paralysed. This leads, of course, to an autopsy scene -- which
I won't spoil here -- and to Lafcadio's involvement with the Voodoo
Cops.
What follows is a breakneck adventure into an environment that is altogether
alien to Lafcadio. It certainly does not help that he is pursuing a
man whose face he cannot recall, but neither is the wall of silence
he faces from the Bizango's previous victims of much benefit. Lafcadio
has to learn new strategies while building re-aligned relationships
with his daughters (they and their mother have moved out). Complicating
the mixture even further is a dawning relationship with the mother of
the original missing child. It is a lot to fit into such a small number
of pages, but Gallagher handles his prose and his commitments with elegance,
muscle and the skill of a writer at the height of his powers.
White Bizango is fast-paced, beautifully crafted, sinister,
funny and cold. Lafcadio in particular is a wonderful creation: sarcastic
but sharp, he seems to the reader like a good man caught up in exceptional
circumstances. This does not of course make him likeable, and it is
to Gallagher's credit that Lafcadio does not come out as a victim, despite
what recent life has thrown at him. He is working the best way he can.
Unhesitatingly recommended.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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