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It could also be said that there was a great vitality to the mean-spiritedness of the town's inhabitants. Sometimes they were creatively cruel to each other, and there were seasons in which Pine Cone was an exciting place to live - if you were a spectator, and not a victim.
In the small town of Pine Cone, Alabama, a rifle explodes and puts local Dean Howell in a coma. His mother Jo Howell (whose husband died of a bite which is attributed to a different creature every time it's mentioned) blames the Pine Cone rifle factory where Dean's wife Sarah and Sarah's best friend and neighbor Beka works, and by proxy blames the entire town.
Jo gives Dean's friend a mysterious amulet as a gift for his wife. The amulet amplifies any negative thought into murderous life; Dean's friend and his entire family are soon violently dead in an inventively gruesome manner. But the amulet remains, to be picked up by a passerby whose entire family is soon violently dead in an inventively gruesome manner, and then someone else picks it up...
While all this is going on, Jo and Sarah and the comatose (or is he?) Dean are all living together, bickering over air conditioning and disability checks and caretaking duties. Soon Sarah is chasing all over town after the amulet, while forced to come home every night to see Jo gleefully munching popcorn at the havoc it leaves in its wake.
The Amulet is an extremely assured, very atmospheric, Southern Gothic horror with social commentary, pitch-black comedy, and clever plotting. The amulet takes the guilty and the innocent alike; in one case where the people are too nice for it to catch even a single mean thought, it manages to work its dark magic via a non-human host. Sarah and Beka's relationship is believable and touching, and Sarah and Jo's relationship is everyone's worst nightmare of living with a terrible roommate who is also your mother-in-law, landlord, and a mass-murdering villain.
I listened to this in audio and enjoyed the hell out of it.
Content notes: Very gruesome. I could have done with less emphasis on Jo being fat, though it had less sting for me as McDowell has sympathetic fat characters elsewhere. Coma/severe injury as horror. Dead children. Dead babies. Dead everyone. IIRC, the dog lives!
Mary Shirley was was one of my favorite characters. The way everyone dies horrifically around her while she remains untouched (though traumatized) was both sympathetic and darkly hilarious. I'm tempted to request post-book Mary Shirley for Yuletide to go with my request for post-book fic for Revelator. The one trick McDowell missed was a scene of her watching the factory carnage.
Speaking of which, the climactic factory scene was great. It was like the prom in Carrie. So satisfyingly OTT.
I liked the ambiguity over certain aspects of the plot, in which questions aren't answered directly but you have enough information to put the pieces together yourself, or to come up with your own answers. Where did the amulet come from? What really happened to Jo Howell's husband? Is Jo somehow communicating with Dean, and if so, is he in on it?
My theory is that Jo can communicate with Dean (maybe through witchy telepathy, or maybe he can speak and just doesn't to anyone else) and he is in on it. Everything we hear about Dean pre-accident makes him sound like a real asshole. I think that the purpose of the amulet isn't only revenge, but a grand-scale blood sacrifice to restore Dean to health; whether it would have worked is an open question, but that was at least the intent.
All three villains - Jo, Dean, and the amulet - wreak havoc over a very wide range despite being literally immobile. This is another source of dark comedy, as literally no one can move fast enough to catch the amulet even though it can't move by itself. The separation between the black and white communities works to its advantage here, as it makes that jump just as Sarah and the cops were starting to close in on it.
I linked the original paperback cover as I like it better - the concept of the people tied together by the amulet chain is brilliant - but there's also an excellent audio edition and an ebook with a thoughtful introduction by Poppy Z. Brite.
In the small town of Pine Cone, Alabama, a rifle explodes and puts local Dean Howell in a coma. His mother Jo Howell (whose husband died of a bite which is attributed to a different creature every time it's mentioned) blames the Pine Cone rifle factory where Dean's wife Sarah and Sarah's best friend and neighbor Beka works, and by proxy blames the entire town.
Jo gives Dean's friend a mysterious amulet as a gift for his wife. The amulet amplifies any negative thought into murderous life; Dean's friend and his entire family are soon violently dead in an inventively gruesome manner. But the amulet remains, to be picked up by a passerby whose entire family is soon violently dead in an inventively gruesome manner, and then someone else picks it up...
While all this is going on, Jo and Sarah and the comatose (or is he?) Dean are all living together, bickering over air conditioning and disability checks and caretaking duties. Soon Sarah is chasing all over town after the amulet, while forced to come home every night to see Jo gleefully munching popcorn at the havoc it leaves in its wake.
The Amulet is an extremely assured, very atmospheric, Southern Gothic horror with social commentary, pitch-black comedy, and clever plotting. The amulet takes the guilty and the innocent alike; in one case where the people are too nice for it to catch even a single mean thought, it manages to work its dark magic via a non-human host. Sarah and Beka's relationship is believable and touching, and Sarah and Jo's relationship is everyone's worst nightmare of living with a terrible roommate who is also your mother-in-law, landlord, and a mass-murdering villain.
I listened to this in audio and enjoyed the hell out of it.
Content notes: Very gruesome. I could have done with less emphasis on Jo being fat, though it had less sting for me as McDowell has sympathetic fat characters elsewhere. Coma/severe injury as horror. Dead children. Dead babies. Dead everyone. IIRC, the dog lives!
Mary Shirley was was one of my favorite characters. The way everyone dies horrifically around her while she remains untouched (though traumatized) was both sympathetic and darkly hilarious. I'm tempted to request post-book Mary Shirley for Yuletide to go with my request for post-book fic for Revelator. The one trick McDowell missed was a scene of her watching the factory carnage.
Speaking of which, the climactic factory scene was great. It was like the prom in Carrie. So satisfyingly OTT.
I liked the ambiguity over certain aspects of the plot, in which questions aren't answered directly but you have enough information to put the pieces together yourself, or to come up with your own answers. Where did the amulet come from? What really happened to Jo Howell's husband? Is Jo somehow communicating with Dean, and if so, is he in on it?
My theory is that Jo can communicate with Dean (maybe through witchy telepathy, or maybe he can speak and just doesn't to anyone else) and he is in on it. Everything we hear about Dean pre-accident makes him sound like a real asshole. I think that the purpose of the amulet isn't only revenge, but a grand-scale blood sacrifice to restore Dean to health; whether it would have worked is an open question, but that was at least the intent.
All three villains - Jo, Dean, and the amulet - wreak havoc over a very wide range despite being literally immobile. This is another source of dark comedy, as literally no one can move fast enough to catch the amulet even though it can't move by itself. The separation between the black and white communities works to its advantage here, as it makes that jump just as Sarah and the cops were starting to close in on it.
I linked the original paperback cover as I like it better - the concept of the people tied together by the amulet chain is brilliant - but there's also an excellent audio edition and an ebook with a thoughtful introduction by Poppy Z. Brite.
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