The Amulet, 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.
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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.
[image error]
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