rachelmanija | Entries tagged with genre: southern gothic

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

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.