Limekiller!

AFTERWORD SECTION

Avram Davidson’s Limekiller stories are rooted in his travels in British Honduras in 1965–1966 and an extended period of residency in 1968. After the first visit, Davidson wrote a travel memoir that charts his itinerary in B. H. just before independence. Unpublished during his lifetime, Dragons in the Trees is colorful, rich in detail and filled with unusual characters and events. There are descriptions of Belize City and its leisurely pace of life; St. George’s Caye, devastated by a hurricane, with ruined burial grounds still visible; a visit to a vacation house at Gallows Point; accounts of Mennonite communities; the last traces of a settlement established by former Confederates; and boom time among the chicleros and mahogany cutters in Cayo, where “They call the Lebanese ‘Turks.’” Readers of the Limekiller stories will recognize many of these locales[1]. “Along the Lower Moho (The Iguana Church)” is one of the most memorable portions of Dragons in the Trees and offers some insights into how Davidson’s fiction grew out of actual experience. This extract was published with two others in the special Avram Davidson issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction, June 2000.

— Henry Wessells