BookBrowse Reviews Blackwater I: The Flood by Michael McDowell

BookBrowse:

Blackwater I: The Flood is a perfect mix of Southern drama, supernatural mystery, and pulp aesthetics that since its publication has drawn in readers of all kinds.

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Blackwater I: The Flood first appeared in bookshops in 1983, with the promise of more than the cheap story its pulp-style cover suggested: it was the first volume of a six-part saga, published in the spirit of 19th-century serials by authors such as Dickens, Stevenson, and Wilkie Collins. True to that legacy, the Blackwater series is both commercial horror fiction and good literature—a southern soap opera with tensions, rivalries, and supernatural overtones; a family drama loaded with irony and subtle humor and carried by contemporary and deceptively simple dialogue; and a novel in which women wield more power and influence than men.

The story is driven by two such memorable women: Mary-Love Caskey, the matriarch of the most powerful family in Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, a mysterious outsider who materializes the Easter Sunday of 1919, the day the Caskeys' destiny will change its course forever, overflowing like the Blackwater River.

That Easter morning, Oscar Caskey, sought-after bachelor and heir to the family sawmill, and his servant, Bray Sugarwhite, row through the dark waters in search of survivors after a catastrophic flood. As they pass the Osceola Hotel, they think it empty...until, on second glance, a red-haired woman appears on one of the submerged beds, claiming to have been there for the last few days, alone. This strange apparition immediately arouses Bray's suspicion, and Oscar's fascination.

Elinor and her arrival become the town's central mystery, especially among the women, the true rulers of Perdido:

"That was the great misconception about men [...] Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions."

The second chapter, fittingly titled "The Ladies of Perdido," introduces a chorus of local women, gathered in church under the guidance of Annie Bell Driver, the Baptist minister. Driver, concerned, goes out in search of Elinor and finds her naked and submerged in the red (like Elinor's hair) water of the Perdido River, her figure and color transformed and unrecognizable.

This is not the only strange event to follow. A young boy disappears where the Blackwater and Perdido Rivers converge, pulled into a whirlpool "where it grabbed you so tight your arms got broken and then it licked the eyeballs right out of your head." His sister, Zaddie, soon takes over his job—sweeping the dried, cracked soil left by the flood in Mary-Love's garden. Zaddie adores Elinor, as does Grace, the daughter of James (Mary-Love's brother), who out of generosity takes the stranger in under his roof. In their garden, life flourishes: Elinor plants seeds one day, and soon they grow into trees tall enough to protect the porch from the strong southern sun.

Heat is not the only southern element that infuses McDowell's work: in this saga, as in his other novels, the author pays homage to the late 19th-century Southern Gothic genre, which often includes grotesque, anomalous, and even supernatural elements. But he delves not only into the supernatural, but also into the very natural human psychology. It is not paranormal phenomena that drive the plot, but human conflict, especially between Mary-Love and Elinor, who becomes a local school teacher and Oscar's fiancée, and eventually his wife. The rivalry between the two is the focus of this first novel: "What he did know was that Elinor was very much like his mother: strong-willed and dominant, wielding power in a fashion he could never hope to emulate."

Mary-Love, calculating and controlling, welcomes Elinor into the family by gifting the newlyweds a house. Yet she delays its construction, furnishing, and handover—effectively keeping the couple under her roof. But Elinor proves far from easy to manipulate, and in the end McDowell leaves the reader eager to dive into Blackwater II: The Levee, the next installment of this family saga that will span 50 years. Nearly half a century after its debut, Blackwater has become a cult phenomenon, with publishers around the world betting on this story and embracing McDowell's vision, publishing the series in attractive and affordable paperback editions whose pages readers cannot stop turning, dying (pun intended) to read the next word of this eerie, immersive, still refreshing and, above all, addictive story. It is fun to read, and that's why we keep doing it.

Michael McDowell, who also wrote the screenplay for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice, said he was proud of being a commercial writer in Faces of Fear (a 1985 collection of interviews with horror writers): "I write things to be published in bookstores next month. I think it's a mistake to try to write for posterity." And yet his work has stood the test of time and, like the waters of the Blackwater River, has flooded bookstores around the world and swept thousands of readers away.

This review first ran in the July 16, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.