"Ollmann spent 10 years researching Seabrook's strange, ramshackle
life, and it shows: his book is wonderfully rich and detailed. Nothing
seems to escape his attention or his compassion." --Rachel Cooke, The
Guardian
The daring and destructive life of the man who popularized the word
"zombie"
In the early twentieth century, travel writing represented the desire
for the expanding bourgeoisie to experience the exotic cultures of the
world past their immediate surroundings. Journalist William Buehler
Seabrook was emblematic of this trend--participating in voodoo
ceremonies, riding camels cross the Sahara desert, communing with
cannibals and most notably, popularizing the term "zombie" in the West.
A string of his bestselling books show an engaged, sympathetic gentleman
hoping to share these strange, hidden delights with the rest of the
world. He was willing to go deeper than any outsider had before. But, of
course, there was a dark side. Seabrook was a barely functioning
alcoholic who was deeply obsessed with bondage and the so-called
mystical properties of pain and degradation. His life was a series of
traveling highs and drunken lows; climbing on and falling off the wagon
again and again. What led the popular and vivid writer to such a sad
state?
Cartoonist Joe Ollmann spent seven years researching Seabrook's life,
interviewing surviving family and accessing long neglected archives, in
order to piece together the peripatetic life of a forgotten American
writer. Often weaving in Seabrook's own words and those of his
biographers, Ollmann's The Abominable Mr. Seabrook posits Seabrook the
believer versus Seabrook the exploiter, and leaves the reader to
consider where one ends and the other begins.
