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 BabylonCold Moon Over Babylon by Michael McDowell



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!

Spoilers! )

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.

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! Read more... )

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.

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