Blackwater: The Complete Saga

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So, the four stars here is indicative of the strength of story idea, dialogue, and creepy parts that will take a while to forget.

This novel, or the combined series of the Caskey Family Sagas, is in my opinion McDowell's best work, a multigenerational family saga that expands far beyond the limitations of being categorized into the Horror genre. The evolution of the country and the history move behind the family's growth like an interesting backdrop. We thus follow the family as they grow both in family members as well as wealth and see the history of this exemplary little town in the American South throughout many years. This is when Elinor Dammert appears — a mysterious young woman who just happens to be sitting in the upper floor of the flooded Osceola Hotel in downtown Perdido when Oscar Caskey and his loyal Negro employee Bray row by. Few books have been able to do that and, once I had gathered my wits, I loved it was able to effect me like that.This saddened me because this book and "The Elementals" are brilliant works and the book community lost so much.

McDowell had contracted to do one for each decade of the century, but he bowed out of the contract after three. Vermillion (1980): The murder of a luckless young hustler brings the attention of a bigoted politician to Boston's tight-knit gay community.

Stories of cruelty and vengeance, of a body that refuses to be cremated, a deranged performer with one last shocking show, a frozen corpse that may not be dead. He understood the political ramification with some nuance, and the prose I found to be efficient, enchanting and beautiful. This first-ever one-volume edition, with a new introduction by Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud, allows a new generation of readers to discover this modern horror classic. Now it just means that I have to take it back off, because I don't really wanna read it, and can't see myself wanting to read it at any point in the future either. His final, unfinished novel Candles Burning was completed by novelist Tabitha King and published in 2006.

In McDowell's second novel, Cold Moon Over Babylon, a murdered woman's corpse is dispatched into a river, but her spirit roams the land, and in the evening hours it seeks revenge on her killer even as he plots the demise of her surviving relatives. Over the next 50 years, Elinor's influence brings prosperity, animosity, death, and reconciliation to the Caskeys.The only thing really "horror" about this story was how these people swapped babies around because they couldn't live in a house without one.

Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. This first-ever one-volume edition, with a new introduction by Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud, marks Blackwater's first appearance in print in three decades and will allow a new generation of readers to discover this modern horror classic. D in English from Brandeis University in 1978, based on a dissertation entitled "American Attitudes Toward Death, 1825–1865". The book primarily features conflict between strong female characters, first between Mary-Love and Elinor, and the conflict is carried on down the line.The series included Jack and Susan in 1953 (1985), Jack and Susan in 1913 (1986) and Jack and Susan in 1933 (1987). Does anybody else find that it is much easier to review books that you don't like, as compared to those that you can't even pick one thing to complain about? It’s truly a unique piece of art that you will only experience from the master of his craft, Michael McDowell.