3 Review(s)

In the tradition of William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, Poor Banished Children of Eve is the haunting saga of the Duval/Leveque clan of Maringouin County, Mississippi, a family tormented by a history of incest and insanity. The story revolves around beautiful, tempestuous Angelique Leveque whose mother Solange Duval Leveque had spent the past twenty-one years, since Angelique’s birth, locked in an upstairs bedroom “mad as a hatter,” as the townspeople said, a fact that no one seems to find peculiar. After all, doesn’t everyone have an insane woman locked in an upstairs bedroom? As the story begins, Angelique is about to be married to Charles Carrington, a “suitable young man,” with a secret and twisted torment of his own, and her impending marriage is breaking the hearts of the town’s young swains, not the least of which, two of her brothers. To add fuel to the fire, Antoine Babineaux returns from prison still in love with Angelique and determined to win her back. Thus begins the first tremors of a tidal wave of tragedy that sweeps over the family and the residents of Jezreel, Mississippi in a miasma of murder, insanity, incest and suicide, to finally reach and explosive and unorthodox climax where they find peace at last. Or do they?