Books
Day of the Dead
Spinsters Ink, 2009
City of dreams. City of nightmares. Heat-soaked days. Rain-filled nights. Shadowy figures vanishing into swirling fog. City of promise, of heartbreak and despair. City of passion, obsession and vengeance. City of innocents–stalked by the ravenous dead. Slip into the shadows of New Orleans’ deepest nights, where the unsuspecting encounter the netherworld of predators of legend. Especially on days of legend: St. Lucy’s Day, Guy Fawkes’ Day, All Hallows Eve, Twelfth Night. Most of all, the Day of the Dead. This is when the dying Maeve will find Rita–who changes everything, including fate. When Miranda Kent, on a very specific hunt in the French Quarter, will overturn lives irrevocably. When Mischa and Raisa, caught between worlds, will find themselves no longer helpless. When scientist Dr. Lily Sahkret will have her every belief challenged by a mysterious band of nuns waging the most ancient and desperate of battles. And, lurking beyond them all, is the woman poised to conquer all, a woman named Katrina. Lock the doors. And even then, read these tales at your peril.
Reviews
The stories in Victoria A. Brownworth’s Day of the Dead are thronged by the lost and lonely–nuns and researchers, ghosts and vampires, students and succubi–abandoned by lovers, by the state, their own faith. People like us, searching for peace and redemption. And through it all steals the mist, the scent of the bayou, and the ringing of bells…
…
Victoria Brownworth is a Pulitzer-nominated Philadelphia journalist and writer. (And activist–AIDS, breast cancer, disability, racism, classism. And Curve contributing editor. And columnist, critic, editor, anthologist, teacher, and cat rescuer. And more. People sometimes tell me I do a lot but I’m an amateur compared to this woman.) These are stories of the lesbians of New Orleans–before, during, and after Katrina–and the fantastical monsters they meet (or are). Despite the otherworldly New Orleans atmosphere, it’s clear that in this fiction everything but the supernatural elements is deeply informed by Brownworth’s personal understanding and journalistic knowledge of the real world.
I’ve never been to New Orleans but I know, now, what it’s like.
“Fog had always held a dangerous allure for her. She was drawn to it, yet knew within its smeared edges and blurry recess there were things she didn’t want to see, things she shouldn’t see. She knew that the fog was the bridge, the hazy portal between the world of the living and the habitation of the dead.” This passage from a story, “Diary of a Drowning,” explains how a kind of representative character, a lesbian documentary filmmaker with an anxious lover in another city, has been seduced by New Orleans, and why she fails to escape in time to survive Hurricane Katrina.
This passage could also serve as an introduction to all seven of the dark tales in Victoria Brownworth’s latest collection of fiction. Each one can be read as an exquisite eulogy for those who don’t survive the disasters of our time ~ unless they become vampires or succubi. Reading these stories could lead one to believe that immortal predators move among us, representing hope as well as danger.
The author’s experience as a journalist has clearly given her firsthand knowledge of real tragedy as well as an urge to comment on it in various genres. Life in these stories is bleak, and not only for the lesbian central characters. …
Lesbian eroticism pervades most of these stories, though there are few explicit sex scenes. The central characters’ desire for carnal knowledge with the women who attract them is inextricably linked to their desire for a sense of rootedness and for a little peace and justice. The fulfillment of desire is shown to be a miraculous reprieve from the random violence of the world.
The supernatural elements in these stories are so well integrated with realistic plots that the reader is constantly reminded that reality as it unfolds is often different than we ever imagined possible. The fate of New Orleans in September 2005 is one example of this, as Brownworth explains bluntly in a final author’s note: “Wraiths and demons, vampires and succubi stalk these stories. But the vampires that sucked the blood from New Orleans were a President, a FEMA director, a Homeland Security Director, and an Administration that had so little concern or compassion for hundreds of thousands of people in one of the most beautiful and compelling cities in the country, that they let the city drown and the people with it.”
An element of advocacy journalism is apparent here as in the rest of these grimly beautiful stories. As she has in previous novels and short stories, Brownworth proves that it is possible to use fantasy fiction as a vehicle for telling the truth.
