Blood On Black

*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE* *ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

They did it. The West Memphis 3 are guilty. They are guilty despite what the documentaries, books and news stories have said over and over. Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. killed three 8-year-olds, Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, on May 5, 1993, in a wooded area in West Memphis, Ark. The murders were thrill kills, according to Echols himself. But they were much more than that. Police were struck by the ritualistic aspects. Local dabblers in the occult immediately came under suspicion. Under questioning, Echols, already acknowledged as a witch, flaunted his knowledge of the occult, his theories of how the killings could have "magickal" implications and his insights into how the killer would think and feel. He demonstrated special knowledge about the case beyond the little publicly known. He gave out signals that he was a prime suspect; a series of witnesses further implicated him. A confession broke open the case. The widely accepted WM3 storyline is that inept police and prosecutors, with a howling mob of religious fanatics to placate, somewhat arbitrarily picked out three innocent boys to blame for horrific murders because Damien and his best pal Jason wore black T-shirts, listened to heavy metal music and had funny haircuts and because the third boy, Little Jessie, was practically retarded and thus easily manipulated. Almost every element in that storyline has little relation to reality. The weirdness that drew the attention of authorities stemmed from bad choices by the suspects rather than clothing, haircuts or rocking out to Megadeth. The West Memphis police did their duty in a diligent if imperfect manner. The investigation was professional and painstaking. Detectives took many statements, followed strange and unpromising leads and administered the polygraph dozens of times. All three of the teens from the trailer parks were convicted. The convictions held up on appeal. Eventually, thanks to Hollywood celebrities and misleading documentaries that left out crucial evidence, the killers who became the West Memphis 3 walked free. No exonerating evidence, despite many years of investigation and a defense fund in the millions of dollars, has been produced. None of the three has a credible alibi. The mainstream media bought into the premise that "those boys were innocent." By putting the focus on mullet-headed rednecks, drawling overweight cops and righteously angry Christians, the media played upon the most egregious stereotypes of Southern whites, while positioning a murdering sociopath as a hip kid who was just too cool for the uptight hometown idiots. The West Memphis 3 myth was made to order for the familiar narrative of the perceptive young outsider that every hipster and aspiring artist imagines himself to have been. Among the sensitive souls who found a doppelganger of their teen selves in Echols were professional outsiders - such as Johnny Depp and Henry Rollins. In Aleister Crowley's "magickal" system, which Echols embraced in his preteen years, orgasm and ecstasy are equated with death and sacrifice and the sexual fluids are often represented as blood or water. Echols felt he was in transition to a state of being a god, something other than human; he believed that drinking blood invested him with spiritual energy. Echols and "blood brother" Jason formed a pathological dyad, cultivating elaborate violent fantasies. Via the ritual torture, killing and eating of dogs, cats and other animals, they educated themselves in the curriculum of occult murder. The lurking allure of a "thrill kill" finally became irresistible when the killing time coincided with sunset, the rise of a full moon and the pagan holiday of Beltane.

In a world where the dead walk, however poorly, for a corpse to sit up at his funeral and curse his ex-partner is shocking but not unheard of.ÿMurder, mayhem, and mirth follow, involving partner Bernie McKay, "Hat" Stetson and his redneck friends, Justin Waley the sword-swinging accountant, and Rod Parker the troll-like deputy sheriff in a search for stolen gold, for revenge, for the truth. ~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~ "Hyaw Raw Yaw!" Bernie McKay jumped and looked around in the dim room.ÿSomeone was coming at him from the kitchen!ÿHe had stumbled away from the stair, so he ran and ducked behind the couches around the coffee table, heart beating quickly.ÿIt came into the light from the window. "No!ÿYou're dead!" Uncle Albert's face gleamed waxily, pulled back and fixed into a scowl, teeth gleaming.ÿHis eyes were swelling, popping out, despite the embalming.ÿHe cawed and croaked, no longer able to speak intelligibly ? but hatred still animated him enough to send him shambling around the coffee table and its couches.ÿHis best suit was incongruously festive, the diamond winking from his tie, shirt sleeves open where he'd lost his studs, black shoes scuffed. "Harr Yaw!" "Back ? get back?"ÿBernie danced sideways, spun a chair into the thing's way. It patiently fumbled the fallen chair aside, never taking its gaze off him.ÿ"Raw Raw Rawrr."ÿIt came on, not fast, not slow, more than ever like some wind-up machine, clumsy, powerful, unsophisticated. Bernie was frightened, but despite that he had a sudden flood of unreality.ÿIt was too absurd a picture, himself confronting this tenacious dead thing from which all rationality had departed.ÿWhat would the neighbors think?ÿA flash of anger shook him. "You stupid asshole!" he barked.ÿ"You can't come in here like this?" Ignoring him, it got close enough to lunge.ÿSweating, Bernie danced around again, brief anger gone and choky fear back.ÿIt wouldn't ever stop coming?ÿHe gripped the smaller of the couches.ÿWhen it turned and started for him again, he aimed the couch like a pool cue and thrust with panicky strength. It was too slow to dodge and was bowled over backward.ÿShrieking You old bastard, Bernie was running for it even as it fell.ÿHe grabbed a chair and made a full overhand sweep with it, staggering as its legs bounced off the ceiling.ÿIt came down with diminished force on Uncle Albert's unprotected head. Wood or bone crunched, and Bernie raised the chair again, panting, glaring.ÿThis time he swept it around in a lower arc, but the corpse let itself fall backward to raise its arms.ÿThe chair crashed into them and did little harm.ÿBefore he could pull it back, Uncle Albert, cawing, had seized it.ÿFor a moment there was a nightmarish tug of war over the chair, then Bernie released it, falling back to the fireplace. The corpse struggled slowly to its feet; Bernie wasted time fumbling for the poker because he couldn't bear to look away from it.ÿWhen he finally had it, the corpse was upright and swinging the chair back over its head, stumbling toward him. Quickly Bernie ran at it, taking advantage of its slow clumsiness, to shove it.ÿBut that brought him face to face with it, and into its evil putrid chemical odor.ÿHe almost panicked, eyeball to eyeball with Death. Hysterically he shoved it away, screaming, "Die!ÿDie!ÿDie!" and swinging the poker again and again, smashing the face, the head, the chair it finally brought forward, following it up as it staggered backward, as it fell, striking and striking and striking, screaming and screaming.ÿ"Dirty rotting scoundrel!"

When nice-girl Kate McGraw finds herself working at Tasty, a magazine with its finger on the pulse of modern style, she’s finally able to put her flair for fashion to good use. But can she keep up with the Tasty staffers? Ethereally beautiful and extremely emaciated, they stay out all night, never look the worse for wear, and are always dressed to kill. Like everyone else around the office, Kate finds herself begrudgingly reading dispatches from a snarky industry blog that dubs her colleagues “bloodthirsty vamps.” She knows they don’t mean it literally, but . . . she’s heard whispers of “fashion murders” and she has noticed strange things around the office: Like, why doesn’t her boss get laminates to fix her sharp teeth? Why are the blinds always drawn, and why is there a no-garlic policy in the cafeteria? As well-dressed bodies begin to pile up near all the hot places, Kate has to wonder if there’s a serial killer loose with a grudge against the stylish. Or if the truth is even more sinister: Are Kate’s coworkers actually undead? And, if so, can she design an exit strategy before she finds herself at Tasty forever?

From John Meaney, the author of Bone Song and “the most important new SF writer of the 21st century,”* comes a new novel, Black Blood. In it he offers his intoxicating blend of futuristic noir and gothic fantasy in a thriller that carries a cop with a personal vendetta across the barrier between life and death. Here, in a morbidly lush necropolis, he must stop a conspiracy of killers whose power is fueled by spilling… He’s lucky to be alive. That’s what everyone tells him. Except Tristopolitan police lieutenant Donal Riordan doesn’t feel lucky and he isn’t really alive. In one horrific moment not even death can erase from memory, Donal lost the woman he loved even as her ultimate sacrifice saved his life. Now it’s literally her heart that beats in his chest and her murder that Donal “lives” to avenge. While being a zombie cop has its upsides—including inhuman reaction time and razor-sharp senses—Donal’s new undead status makes him the target of Tristopolis’s powerful Unity Party, whose startling rise to power is built on a platform of antizombie paranoia and persecution. The Party is no friend, to be sure—but it’s the secret cabal known as the Black Circle and their stranglehold on the city’s elite that consume Donal’s black heart. For at the center of this ring of evil is the man responsible for his lover’s murder—a man Donal has already had to kill once before. Now, with ominous reports of white wolf sightings throughout the city and a dangerous sabotage attempt at police headquarters, all signs indicate that the Black Circle is planning a magical coup d’état. And the terror will begin with a political assassination triggered by a necroninja already hidden… in a place no one expects. For Donal, it’s no longer a matter of life and death but something far more serious. How can he stop a killer who won’t stay dead and an evil that death only makes stronger? *Times (London)

A bold new indictment of the racialization of science Decades of data cannot be ignored: African American adults are far more likely to develop Type 2 diabetes than white adults. But has science gone so far in racializing diabetes as to undermine the search for solutions? In a rousing indictment of the idea that notions of biological race should drive scientific inquiry, Sweetness in the Blood provides an ethnographic picture of biotechnology’s framings of Type 2 diabetes risk and race and, importantly, offers a critical examination of the assumptions behind the recruitment of African American and African-descent populations for Type 2 diabetes research. James Doucet-Battle begins with a historical overview of how diabetes has been researched and framed racially over the past century, chronicling one company’s efforts to recruit African Americans to test their new diabetes risk-score algorithm with the aim of increasing the clinical and market value of the firm’s technology. He considers African American reticence about participation in biomedical research and examines race and health disparities in light of advances in genomic sequencing technology. Doucet-Battle concludes by emphasizing that genomic research into sub-Saharan ancestry in fact underlines the importance of analyzing gender before attempting to understand the notion of race. No disease reveals this more than Type 2 diabetes. Sweetness in the Blood challenges the notion that the best approach to understanding, managing, and curing Type 2 diabetes is through the lens of race. It also transforms how we think about sugar, filling a neglected gap between the sugar- and molasses-sweetened past of the enslaved African laborer and the high-fructose corn syrup- and corporate-fed body of the contemporary consumer-laborer.

A story of heroism, friendship, and courage in World War 2—as seen in the award-winning HBO miniseries The Pacific. In 1944, the U.S. Marines were building the 5th Marine Division—also known as “The Spearhead”—in preparation for the invasion of the small, Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima... When Chuck Tatum began Marine boot camp, he was just a smart-aleck teenager eager to serve his country. Little did he know that he would be training under a living legend of the Corps—Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone, who had almost single-handedly fought off a Japanese force of three thousand on Guadalcanal. It was from Basilone and other sergeants that Tatum would learn how to fight like a Marine and act like a man—skills he would need when he hit the black sand of Iwo Jima with thirty thousand other Marines. Red Blood, Black Sand is the story of Chuck’s two weeks in hell, where he would watch his hero, Basilone, fall, where the enemy stalked the night, where snipers haunted the day, and where Chuck would see his friends whittled away in an eardrum-shattering, earth-shaking, meat grinder of a battle. This is the island, the heroes, and the tragedy of Iwo Jima—through the eyes of one who survived it.

Alisa and Ray think they're the only vampires left until they witness a series of brutal murders. The plot contains profanity, sexual situations and violence. Book #2 Last Vampire series; Book #2 of Thirst No. 1 bind-up.