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Though she had no remembrance of her parents, Margaret Larkin never went swimming in the river, for fear that she would be dragged down to the bottom by her drowned mother and father.
The small southern town of Babylon contains the unsubtly named river Styx, in which Margaret Larkin's parents died in a peculiar accident involving a boat and a sackful of rattlesnakes. Margaret, age 14, lives with her adult brother Jerry, their grandmother, and a barely-hanging-in-there blueberry farm. Until Margaret is mysteriously murdered and tossed into the Styx...
This is not a story in which a girl dies to motivate some man to avenge her. It's a story about how a dead girl, with the help of the river, avenges her own murder.
The identity of the murderer is revealed fairly early on, so we get to enjoy watching Margaret serve cold, muddy revenge on him. (Her family helps.) A review I now can't locate called this book something like "the scariest book I ever read about squishing sounds," which is largely true. Cold Moon Over Babylon is all about luxuriating in prose and atmosphere and building dread leading up to a satisfyingly batshit climax in which river water isn't the only thing that squishes.
I have now read three books by Michael McDowell, all three of which I greatly enjoyed, and can say confidently that he was the go-to author for atmospheric southern gothic horror with slow-burn creepiness and dark comedy stemming from sharp observation of character and setting. It's not just that his settings are characters in their own right, but the combination of a place and its inhabitants and culture is also its own character.
Content note: rape (not graphic), gleefully gory violence.
Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell
The small southern town of Babylon contains the unsubtly named river Styx, in which Margaret Larkin's parents died in a peculiar accident involving a boat and a sackful of rattlesnakes. Margaret, age 14, lives with her adult brother Jerry, their grandmother, and a barely-hanging-in-there blueberry farm. Until Margaret is mysteriously murdered and tossed into the Styx...
This is not a story in which a girl dies to motivate some man to avenge her. It's a story about how a dead girl, with the help of the river, avenges her own murder.
The identity of the murderer is revealed fairly early on, so we get to enjoy watching Margaret serve cold, muddy revenge on him. (Her family helps.) A review I now can't locate called this book something like "the scariest book I ever read about squishing sounds," which is largely true. Cold Moon Over Babylon is all about luxuriating in prose and atmosphere and building dread leading up to a satisfyingly batshit climax in which river water isn't the only thing that squishes.
I have now read three books by Michael McDowell, all three of which I greatly enjoyed, and can say confidently that he was the go-to author for atmospheric southern gothic horror with slow-burn creepiness and dark comedy stemming from sharp observation of character and setting. It's not just that his settings are characters in their own right, but the combination of a place and its inhabitants and culture is also its own character.
Content note: rape (not graphic), gleefully gory violence.
Cold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell