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Book Reviewed by:As the dark and menacing waters of the local river submerge Perdido, a small town in the south of Alabama, the Caskeys - a family of rich landowners - must confront the tide of damage caused by the flood.
Led by Mary-Love, the powerful matriarch, and by Oscar, her devoted son, the family must pick itself back up. But what they haven't anticipated is the sudden appearance of Elinor Dammert - a mysterious but seductive young woman with a troubling past. Her sole ambition appears to be to infiltrate the very heart of the Caskey clan...
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 humour and carried by contemporary and deceptively simple dialogue; and a novel in which women wield more power and influence than men. 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...continued
Full Review
(805 words)
(Reviewed by Alicia Calvo Hernández).
Peter Straub
One of the best writers of horror in this or any other country. Stephen King
Riveting, terrifying, and just absolutely great ... Michael McDowell must now be regarded as the finest writer of paperback originals in America.
When he died on December 27, 1999, Michael McDowell's name was barely recognized beyond the realm of horror aficionados. Despite Stephen King having once praised him as "the finest writer of paperback originals in America," his novels had fallen into relative obscurity by the end of the 20th century. In fact, the Washington Post titled its obituary "Screenwriter Michael McDowell Dies."
Indeed, McDowell was behind the screenplay for Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (1988), and collaborated with the filmmaker on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). Yet his work as an author was far more prolific: he published more than 30 novels, most of them set in his native Alabama, and many rooted in the Southern Gothic horror genre.
Among them is the ...
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