Voodoo.... The very word conjures shadowy and sinister images of black magic and primitive rites and rituals: crudely fashioned dolls stuck with pins, mojos, animal sacrifices, wild dancing to savage drumbeats, venomous snakes, and bones charged with lethal supernatural powers that can make a person drop dead for no apparent reason. Then there are zombies--the soulless living dead, whose reanimated corpses are sprung from graves at midnight to mindlessly serve the summoning voodoo houngan.

Some of this is fact, some is fiction, and most is exaggeration. In the extended introduction John Richard Stephens delves into the real world of authentic voodoo, exposing the myths and exploring its mysteries, from its birthplace in the jungles of Africa to its practice in the islands of the Caribbean and the dark swamps of Louisiana.

The book then enters the entertaining realm of fiction, presenting harrowing horror classics by H. G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as little-known tales of voodoo by forgotten fantasy masters. Here you find curses, bewitchings, wild festivals in Louisiana bayou, a series of axe murders, and zombies.

Voodoo will entertain you with its authentic accounts of voodoo ceremonies and beliefs, as well as its chilling tales of terror that just might make you look warily over your shoulder and wonder, what if?