Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Bitter Grounds

A bleak, zombie-type short story by Neil Gaiman, and an online freebie here at Tor.com. Brace yourself for the strong possibility of being confused on first read ... like I was. A huge thanks to karen for helping me to interpret this story (see the thread to her review for our discussion, but be warned there are major spoilers in those comments). Our discussion, and a reread of this story after, led me to increase my rating from 3 stars to 4.

Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.

He’s a man running away from his life (there are hints of a failed relationship), driving away from his home and then continuing to just drive, throwing his cell phone out of the car window, withdrawing all of his money from his accounts. He meets a stranger along the way, Jackson Anderton, an anthropologist who studies young Haitian girls who sold coffee door-to-door and were rumored to be zombies. When Anderton mysteriously disappears, the man gathers Anderton’s ID and scholarly papers and slips into Anderton’s role as an attendee and presenter at an anthropologists’ conference in New Orleans. There he meets more people who drift in and out of his life, each sharing cynical or disturbing thoughts or ideas or other things that seem to pull the narrator further along his path toward some destiny that awaits him.

People come into your life for a reason.

“Bitter Grounds” is Neil Gaiman‘s bleak take on Haitian zombies in a New Orleans setting. I have to say, my first read of it has left me massively bewildered, flailing around on the internet in an attempt to make sense of what I had just read. It’s an elusive, subtle horror story, with hints of death and rot, grim humor, and quotes from Zora Neale Hurston, an African American author, folklorist and anthropologist, woven into the mix.

“Bitter Grounds” is a Gaiman story (like “A Study in Emerald”) that has layers and elements that reveal themselves more fully with study and rereading. A fan of Hurston or Haitian voodoo would doubtless find fruitful ground here. I would love to discuss and unpack this story in a literature course, complete with a study guide and a knowledgeable professor to help explain and analyze its elements. Even reading it twice, I felt like I was missing a lot … but I appreciated what I was able to catch.

Initial post: "Bitter Grounds" is Neil Gaiman's take on Haitian zombies in a New Orleans setting. I have to say, my first read of it has left me bewildered (which isn't an uncommon reaction, based on the other GR reviews here). Is the narrator a zombie (and an unreliable narrator in that case) or is he just a man who's lost his way in life and is drifting? I'm not sure ....

Maybe karen will explain it to me.

Content note: Several F-bombs.