Hadriana in All My Dreams

Originally published in 1988 and written by one of Haiti's seminal authors, still with us at age 90, this vibrant, erotically charged work shows how humans counter fear—particularly the fear of death—in varied more or less magical ways, even as it paints a fresh and enticing picture of Haitian culture. In the 1930s, teenage Balthazar Granchiré has been turned into an ugly butterfly by his adoptive father, a sorcerer angry at his relentless lechery. In that form, he reputedly engages in a string of excessive deflowerings, and he may be responsible for the death of beautiful, beloved young Frenchwoman Hadriana Siloé on the day of her wedding in a notably mixed marriage to local Hector Danoze. The community immediately splits in its response, assuring "a pitiless battle between the two belief systems that have long gone head-to-head in Haitian imagination"; the French Catholics piously observe a wake while others indulge in the "orgiastic excesses of Vodou." Afterward, the corpse of Hadriana disappears, with an uncle of the young narrator carefully giving evidence that she has become a zombie.