The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

annihilating heat of the Alabama summer at Beldame, the compound of three Victorian mansions perched on an ocean of glittering white sand on the Alabama shore—mansions that never existed in real life, but which were conjured to life by the writer whose novel you are now holding in your hands.

I have lived in Alabama most of my life. It is miserably hot at times.

As someone not unfamiliar with gothic horror fiction, especially ghost stories, I am struck, today as in 1981, by that sunstruck Gulf shore brightness.

Truth! So bright!! I am surprised by this too. No darkness in Gulf Shores.

as much of a character, indeed, as any of those three terribly-occupied houses at Beldame.

The Alabama panhandle, he writes, which consists only of Mobile and Baldwin counties, is shaped rather like a heavily abscessed tooth. Mobile Bay represents the large element of decay that separates the halves, and at their northern extremities the counties are further divided by a complex system of meandering

rivers and marsh.

In the words of Odessa Red, the family retainer housekeeper who serves as the novel’s “Van Helsing” figure,

This is a horror novel for the ages, a 20th century haunted house that belongs in the company of Hill House, Hell House, or the Marsten House.

In the middle of a desolate Wednesday afternoon in the last sweltering days of May, a handful of mourners were gathered in the church dedicated to St. Jude Thaddeus in Mobile, Alabama.

Sister Mary-Scot let go the handle of the knife. Her hands trembled in the space above the coffin, her lips moved in prayer.

Dauphin pressed the blade an inch deep into the corpse’s sunken breast.

The blade emerged coated with the mixed coagulated liquids of the unembalmed body.

Sister Mary-Scot flung away the empty black box and it clattered on the polished wooden floor.