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Pat Conroy wrote, My mother, southern to the bone, once told me, “All southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'”
Michael McDowell has a different but equally great encapsulation of the southern Gothic. Click to listen to a brief audio excerpt of The Elementals.
"Did they stick the knife in the dead baby too?"
What I like best about is the way it just keeps going and going and getting more and more Gothically batshit. I actually burst out laughing.
McDowell wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This book is much darker and more serious overall, but a lot of the dialogue and some of the events has a similarly anarchic, bizarre humor.
The Elementals is a slow-paced, extremely atmospheric southern Gothic about two intermarried families, the Savages and the McCrays, and a profoundly ill-fated vacation they take on a private island called Beldame. It has a parrot that squawks "Savage mothers eat their children," a haunted house slowly being swallowed by a sand dune, haunted photographs, and a heaping helping of bizarre family drama. It also, unfortunately, has perhaps the Platonic ideal of the Magical Negro trope in the form of the housekeeper Odessa.
Apart from that, I enjoyed this a lot. It's eerie rather than scary for the most part, all sun-drenched lassitude with background creepiness punctuated by sudden interruptions of surreal horror and dark comedy. Beldame is a character in its own right, as is the heat and the sand.
Giant spoiler!
And by "sudden," I mean stuff like Odessa and teenage India having an earnest conversation about the hauntings, with the chapter ending with Odessa saying, "And if anything goes wrong, EAT MY EYES."
The eponymous elementals are only referred to by that name two or three times. I have no idea why the book got named that rather than The Third House, which is crucial to the story and referenced about once per page.
Michael McDowell has a different but equally great encapsulation of the southern Gothic. Click to listen to a brief audio excerpt of The Elementals.
"Did they stick the knife in the dead baby too?"
What I like best about is the way it just keeps going and going and getting more and more Gothically batshit. I actually burst out laughing.
McDowell wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This book is much darker and more serious overall, but a lot of the dialogue and some of the events has a similarly anarchic, bizarre humor.
The Elementals is a slow-paced, extremely atmospheric southern Gothic about two intermarried families, the Savages and the McCrays, and a profoundly ill-fated vacation they take on a private island called Beldame. It has a parrot that squawks "Savage mothers eat their children," a haunted house slowly being swallowed by a sand dune, haunted photographs, and a heaping helping of bizarre family drama. It also, unfortunately, has perhaps the Platonic ideal of the Magical Negro trope in the form of the housekeeper Odessa.
Apart from that, I enjoyed this a lot. It's eerie rather than scary for the most part, all sun-drenched lassitude with background creepiness punctuated by sudden interruptions of surreal horror and dark comedy. Beldame is a character in its own right, as is the heat and the sand.
Giant spoiler!
And by "sudden," I mean stuff like Odessa and teenage India having an earnest conversation about the hauntings, with the chapter ending with Odessa saying, "And if anything goes wrong, EAT MY EYES."
The eponymous elementals are only referred to by that name two or three times. I have no idea why the book got named that rather than The Third House, which is crucial to the story and referenced about once per page.
