Pour One for the Devil

The Gullah culture and folk beliefs of South Carolina and Georgia’s Sea Islands serve as the foundation for this wobbly contemporary Southern gothic from Van Alst (The Longest Street in the World). Events begin innocently enough when Dr. Van Vierlans, a Native American academic and fiction writer, accepts the invitation of Elizabeth Morganstern, a white plantation owner on Coosaw Island, to read from his work on local shell rings as ancestral sites of power. Though relatively fluent in the Gullah tongue, Van Vierlans proves ill-informed about the history of the Morganstern plantation and how it intertwines with the superstitions of Elizabeth’s Gullah servants. Over the course of one booze-soaked evening, Van Vierlans discovers that he has been not so much invited to the island as lured there to play a role in an arcane ritual. Van Alst’s colorful descriptions of the setting conjure a fantastic atmosphere that makes the extraordinary seem possible, but several plot threads go underdeveloped, resulting in a whole that feels mashed together from independently conceived ideas. Still, fans of the macabre will enjoy this tale for its unique perspective on an underrepresented culture and its legends. (Mar.)