Children of the Dusk
by Janet Berliner and George Guthridge
Summary
In 1940 the Nazi government drew up serious plans to deport Europe's Jews to Madagascar. The plan was real, it was studied, and it was abandoned. This novel asks what would have happened if it had not been.
Solomon, Erich and Miriam arrive on Nosy Mangabé, a small island off the Madagascar coast, in a party of one hundred and forty four Jews, forty heavily armed Nazis, a Malagasy guide named Bruqah and Erich's unit of trained dogs. What follows is part survival narrative and part something older and stranger, as the island turns out to have its own arrangements and Bruqah turns out to know more than he says.
Two things are worth knowing before starting. First, this is the third and final volume of the Madagascar Manifesto trilogy, and while it can be read alone, the relationships between the three central characters carry years of history you will be picking up as you go. Second, it is horror in a specific sense: the supernatural element is real, but the dread is generated mostly by the human arrangement on the beach, where the guards outnumber nobody and everyone understands what the dogs are for.
Berliner and Guthridge write it straight and unhurried, and the restraint is the right choice given the material. There is no winking at the reader and no attempt to make the premise clever, which is what keeps an alternate history about the Holocaust from becoming distasteful.
It is a strange, sincere and largely forgotten book, and the strangeness is worth the trip for readers who want horror that takes its history seriously.
Historical Context & Significance
Children of the Dusk won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel for 1997, closing out the Madagascar Manifesto trilogy that Janet Berliner and George Guthridge had begun with Child of the Light and Child of the Journey.
The award is voted by the membership of the Horror Writers Association, which has historically been more willing than most juries to recognise horror that works through history rather than through monsters, and this is a novel where the horror is largely a matter of documented policy.
The trilogy has had a quiet afterlife. It was later reissued in a single volume, which is now the easiest way to read it, and the Madagascar plan itself has since become better known to general readers through histories of the Holocaust, giving the premise a recognition it did not have in 1997.