I saw the cover for the VHS of The Serpent and the Rainbow at the video shop after mass when I was a kid. I’ve mentioned before how I would become hung up on the covers of these 18+ rated forbidden films that it seemed I would never see. It stayed with me, and as soon as I could, downloaded and watched the movie. The only thing I remember about the film is that I thought it was shit, so it’s not surprising that I never bothered tracking down the book.

I don’t know why, but it popped into my head the other day, and it took me just a few minutes to locate a copy of the book. I knew that the author was an academic, and the book was somehow related to zombies and voodoo, but I didn’t really know what to expect.

The book starts off like an adventure novel, the author describing some his experiences in the jungle of south America as a student. This stuff is quite impressive and made me jealous. I never got to travel through the jungle for credits during my time in university.
The main adventure begins when he approached by some weirdo academics who tell him about Haitian voodoo and their desire to acquire the elusive poison that is used to turn people into zombies. There had long been claims that people in Haiti were dying and being buried, only to return to their families years later with little to no memory of the intervening time period. The locals attributed this to voodoo, but the academics believed it was being done with a potent chemical.

Davis goes to Haiti to track this stuff down, and he meets a bunch of colourful characters. He helps one of these weirdoes dig up the corpse of a child and then they mix parts of that decaying infant into a potion with bits and pieces of some minging animals.

After a bit of research, Davis realises that it’s the inclusion of a pufferfish in this mixture that’s responsible for the apparent reanimation of corpses. The poison in pufferfish is known to temporarily paralyze in small enough doses, and it is not completely out of the range of possibility that this poison, along with continued doses of other drugs could result in the kind of zombification that had been reported in Haiti.

From what I have read online, Davis’s claims were not well received by the scientifific community. Very little of the pufferfish poison was actually found in the samples of the zombie potion that Davis acquired. There has been debate on this since, but the fishier element (excuse the pun) to me is the notion of zombification. I can’t find any footage online of actual zombification. I’m not expert on Haiti, but I know that it’s had more than its share of troubles. I find it very easy to understand how stories from a place like this could become twisted and exaggerated. Maybe I’m totally wrong about this, but it seems to me that the entire Haitian zombie phenomena is probably bullshit.

The worst part of this book was that it reminded me of John Russo’s absolutely terrible Voodoo Dawn novel that I read a few weeks ago. I’ve read a few other novels about voodoo (Strange Conflict by Dennis Wheatley and Frank Lauria’s Doctor Orient novels come to mind), but I have to say, the only truly enjoyable book I’ve read that really featured voodoo was Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel.