The Elementals, 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.
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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.
[image error]
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