Point of View

The main points of view of A Visitation of Spirits are the third-person narratives of 16-year-old Horace Cross and his cousin Reverend James Greene. The novel briefly features the third-person narratives of Ruth and Ezekiel Cross which convey family history and the characters' internal reflections. An unnamed narrator also addresses the reader in the second person, in which the historical traditions of hog killing and tobacco harvesting in North Carolina are outlined in detail.

Horace is established as an unreliable narrator in the novel's first section, 'White Sorcery'. After a black magic ritual supposedly causes a demon to enter Horace's mind, his narrative features extensive auditory and hallucinations. The author writes in a way that clearly distinguishes reality from Horace's psychosis, making the contents of his narrative relatively easy to understand. Due to the limited third-person narration, the author is able to omit plot details...