Yellow Moon »

Jewell Parker Rhodes, an award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction, including Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass' Women, Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors, and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction, is the Virginia G. Piper Chair in Creative Writing and artistic director of the Virginia G. Piper Center in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A jazzman, a wharf worker, a prostitute, all murdered. Wrists punctured, their bodies impossibly drained of blood. What connects them? Why are they rising as ghosts?

Marie Levant, the great-great granddaughter of the Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau, knows better than anyone New Orleans's brutal past — the legacy of slavery, poverty, racism, and sexism — and as a doctor at Charity Hospital's ER, she treats its current victims.

When she sleeps, she dreams of blood. Rain, never ending. The river is rising and the yellow moon warns of an ancient evil — an African vampire — wazimamoto — a spirit created by colonial oppression.

The struggle becomes personal, as the wazimamoto is intent on destroying her and all the Laveau descendants. Marie fights to protect her daughter, lover, and herself from the wazimamoto's seductive assault on both body and spirit.

Echoing with the heartache and triumph of the African-American experience, the soulful rhythms of jazz, and the horrors of racial oppression, Yellow Moon gives us an unforgettable heroine — sexy, vulnerable, and mysterious — in Marie Levant, while it powerfully evokes a city on the brink of catastrophe.

Yellow Moon is part two of the New Orleans trilogy that began with Voodoo Season — magical realist fiction that takes the legend of the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau, as imagined by Jewell Parker Rhodes in the bestselling Voodoo Dreams, into the present day.

Publishers Weekly

In Rhodes's superb sequel to 2006's Voodoo Season, a wazimamoto, or African vampire, stalks Dr. Marie Laveau, a 21st-century doctor, modern voodoo practitioner and descendant of the legendary Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Haunted by the unquiet spirits of people killed by the wazimamoto, the young doctor vows to stop it with the help of new boyfriend NOPD Det. Daniel Parks; her Creole boss, Dr. Louis DuLac; and others devoted to Marie and her young adopted daughter, Marie-Claire. As the blood of the victims nourishes the vampire so it can completely assume human form, Marie must summon all her powers to vanquish it. Rhodes includes an informative author's note about the evolution of the African vampire as a "response and a warning about racist brutality" and "cultural vampirism," giving some cultural weight to this hypnotic thriller. (Aug.)

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