The Red Gods

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. In the fevered world of French Indo-China, where river steamers, colonial outposts, and mission stations cling to the edge of vast unexplored forests, The Red Gods unfolds as an exotic adventure-romance charged with mystery and doom. It begins in an opium den in Cho-lon, where narrator Jules Bressond drifts into narcotic visions before being shaken awake by a stranger who turns out to be his childhood friend, Pierre de Lursac—once vigorous, now ravaged by some hidden catastrophe. As Pierre's story emerges through smoke and memory, the tale moves back to Saigon, where his arrival in the shimmering colonial heat leads to renewed contact with old friends and a posting deep in the interior near the Pou-Kas canal. At the same time, Father Ravennes listens to the testimony of Hmon, a Stieng woman whose pilgrimage into the sacred lands of the Red Gods reveals a terrifying ritual world of chanting priestesses, monstrous idols, and barren women seeking divine aid. Her account, and that of another forest woman fleeing brutal consecration, exposes the violence beneath the mystery and sends Lursac and the missionary racing toward the sanctuary before the procession arrives.