White Man's Grave by Richard Dooling - June 1994

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, June 1994. Hardcover. First Edition (stated). Quarter-bound in white linen with purple paper sides and black printing to spine. Very Good book in a Very Good jacket with belly band. Light stain to bottom fore edge. Interior pristine. Spine straight and tight, ends bumped. Crease at edge of belly band front flap. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. 386 pages.

An autobiographical novel dressed as fiction because anybody who has not lived in Sierra Leone could not believe that these events actually happened. If you were a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone in the 1980s, you may recognize the main characters. A finalist for the 1994 National Book Award for Fiction.

Michael Killigan, a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone, is missing. The search for him is launched separately by his father, Randall, a master-of-the-universe and warlord of the Indianapolis bankruptcy courts. and Michael's best friend, Boone Westfall. Once in Freetown, Boone falls in with Sam Lewis, an unscrupulous volunteer who's fed up with Sierra Leone. Lewis leads Boone into the bush and turns him over to Aruna Sisay, "the white Mende man," a fallen anthropologist who's sworn off the rigors of fieldwork. Back in America, Randall receives an ominous bundle of black rags from Sierra Leone and starts to experience terrifying sleep disorders. A raving hypochondriac, he bankrolls a search for his son, while seeking a medical explanation for his nocturnal hallucinations. Meanwhile. Liberian rebels are crossing the border in the south of Sierra Leone, elections are erupting into riots, and the countryside is ruled by warring secret societies of leopard and baboon men which still practice witchcraft and human sacrifice to win political power. But where's Michael? To find Killigan. Boone must negotiate witches and witch-finders, disgruntled ancestors and bush devils, bad medicine and "shapeshifters" who roam about in the guise of animals. And Randall learns that the bundle of rags may have transformed itself into a spirit and "entered" him, causing supernatural disturbances. Both begin by wondering if witchcraft is "true" and conclude that if it "works," it may as well be. An exuberantly funny satire in which litigation, modern medicine, and the insurance business begin to look a lot like traditional witchcraft.