The Manitou was an instant hit on many Indian reservations, and I still have the framed painting of Sitting Bull which was given to me in a special ceremony by his great-granddaughter.

That was why I rewrote the last two chapters so that Misquamacus would be defeated by the 'white manís Manitou' - the technological spirit inherent in the Unitrak computer, against which the magic of the 16th century would have no defense. a denouement in which the hero Harry Erskine played an active role. When I submitted The Manitou to Andy Ettinger at Pinnacle Books, however, he said he wanted a more dramatic ending. Wells had used for destroying the Martians in The War of the Worlds, and also drew on the (true) stories of the US Calvary distributing typhoid-infected blankets to Native Americans in order to wipe out whole tribes that had never before been exposed to European diseases.īack then, one of the most virulent communicable diseases was 'Viet Nam Rose' - a gonhorrea-type venereal infection which had been brought back from the brothels of Saigon by US soldiers.

In looking for a way in which the re-emergent wonder-worker could be defeated, I adapted the idea that H.G. And I also remembered the mysterious Indian character Quamus that H.P. I remembered an article I had read about Native American spirits - 'manitous' in The Buffalo Bill Annual, 1955. So instead of relying on supernatural threats from the Old World, I turned to America, which (as far as I know) had never been done before. In those days I was writing solely for US publishers, and I needed the story to appeal primarily to the US market. My wife Wiescka was expecting our first son, and I wanted to write a scary story about the unexpectedness of bringing a new life into the world.

The Manitou was written in the winter of 1974, on a kitchen table in Chiswick, West London, in five days flat.

The manitou graham masterton