Black Medicine

E. F. Bleiler described Black Medicine as "a weak collection. The Caribbean stories show racial bias to the point of grotesqueness, and most of the other stories are routine pulp fiction. ["Three Coffins"] has points of interest, and ["Bells of Oceana"] is worth reading for a certain baroque, exuberant overkill of horror."^[1]

Set against the backdrop of the United States occupation of Haiti, the title story was the cover story for the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales. "What makes Burks' text interesting," wrote one critic, "is the chaotic mixture of imperial and anti-imperial sentiments." The protagonist specifically calls Haitians "dull and stupid", yet the Haitian characters are depicted as both formidable and sophisticated enough to have founded the society Burks calls "the Black Republic".^[2]

Burks was a U.S. Marine who had served in Haiti, In his Caribbean stories he "depicts Caribbean people as savage beasts", though Raphael Dalleo notes that "Burks's writing is representative of the discourse about the Caribbean that structured how West Indians ... would have been seen by a U.S. audience in the 1920s."^[3] "The most pointed hatred and derision," said another critic, "straight from the lexicon of homegrown racism":^[4]: 175

Burks's Haiti was a site of sexual excess, gender disorder, and primitive savagery, It was a land characterized bt the effective absence of the family as a basis for social order. In Burks's telling, the grotesque horror of Haiti showed the obvious and urgent need for American rule there.^[4]: 178

• Jaffery, Sheldon (1989). The Arkham House Companion. Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, Inc. p. 83. ISBN 1-55742-005-X.
• Chalker, Jack L.; Mark Owings (1998). The Science-Fantasy Publishers: A Bibliographic History, 1923-1998. Westminster, MD and Baltimore: Mirage Press, Ltd. p. 44.
• Joshi, S.T. (1999). Sixty Years of Arkham House: A History and Bibliography. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House. pp. 96–97. ISBN 0-87054-176-5.
• Nielsen, Leon (2004). Arkham House Books: A Collector's Guide. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. p. 98. ISBN 0-7864-1785-4.