Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (book), Simon and Schuster, 1985

Wade Davis's own account of his fieldwork in Haiti as a Harvard trained ethnobotanist, investigating the case of Clairvius Narcisse and the wider phenomenon of reported zombification. Its strength is that it is the primary scholarship the 1988 film adapted, giving a documented baseline for what the film changed. Its limit, honestly recorded rather than smoothed over, is that its central scientific claim, that a specific poison drawn from puffer fish and other ingredients explains zombification, was contested by other researchers who reported finding little or no tetrodotoxin in the samples Davis provided, so the book is cited here for its documented fieldwork and its relationship to the film, not as settled science.