Blackwater: The Complete Saga

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We learn this early in book one. So, really y'all, I'm not spoiling things (much). But the fact that throughout the entire series, Elinor spends 99% of her time as an iron-willed Southern matriarch, waging a war of wills against her mother-in-law for the first few volumes, scheming to enrich her husband and her family and to get her way against the wishes of the domineering, spiteful Mary-Love Caskey is what makes that other 1% so much more horrific, when she periodically assumes her true form, usually to perform some act of gruesome violence. Two of the three lumber mills in Perdido belong to Marie-Love and James so you can imagine the family's status in the small town. This is my first time reading a graphic novel like this and I very much enjoyed it! This is obviously the first part to a series, since it was basically just the inciting incident of the series, but it was entertaining! I definitely want to see what the rest of the story holds for them, especially since there was a cliff hanger. The art style was very cool, and even though the artist switches each chapter there was still a continuity between them. I can’t say much more since it was so short other than I liked it and will keep my eye out for the rest of the series!

Stamm, Michael E. (1988). "Michael McDowell and the Haunted South". In Schweitzer, Darrell (ed.). Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II. Borgo Press. pp.51–62. ISBN 978-1587150098. So, the four stars here is indicative of the strength of story idea, dialogue, and creepy parts that will take a while to forget.

Numbered Edition

As Kelly grows closer and closer to death, her hallucinations become more vivid until she is imagining her parents, very old, watching her being pulled from the water in horror. She imagines herself as a child reaching up to be carried away.

Sixty thousand men from Renly's army are still encamped at Bitterbridge, and when news of Renly's death reaches them, [19] fighting breaks out between Stannis' supporters and Renly's loyalists led by the vengeful Loras Tyrell. Parmen Crane and Erren Florent—the two knights sent by Stannis to retrieve the army for him [19]—are taken prisoner, [40] while Lord Randyll Tarly seizes the supplies and puts many men, mostly Florents, to death in the fighting at Bitterbridge. [28] The novel makes several references to both contemporary political and popular culture. Republican presidents George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan are both castigated in the narrative, [2] while Bobby Kennedy and the Vietnam War are referred to as representing the cushy Democratic era. [3] In Chapter 24, the Senator mentions the 1991 Gulf War. I would have liked to seen more of an ending to the conflict between Eli and his mother and not ending it on a bitter note between the two of them. And a scene were you have Tony and his friend Biff come together again and just see some conclusion towards that. It was nice to see Tony and his dad connect more though. I appreciate the immensely diverse character cast, but disliked every character I met so far besides Marcia, and found the plot difficult to follow and extremely rushed. This isn't for me, but I'm sure it will better suit a lot of other readers.Madness is central to McDowell's Toplin, which details the vile imaginings of a man who suffers from mental illness but nonetheless determines to conduct himself within society. D'Ammassa praised Toplin as "perhaps the best novel ever written from the point of view of a schizophrenic." But there is something beneath the surface of this family drama that makes it special and horrific. Michael McDowell manages to weave it into the story so organically that you can go for many chapters forgetting that this is a supernatural horror story, because the horror only emerges now and then, at dramatic moments. But always in such a way to remind you that the horror at the heart of the Caskey family has been there all along, and is never far from the surface. The writing reminded me a lot of Jeffery Archer's style (note, I've only read one book of his, but...) : while I became very familiar with the characters, I didn't find there was a whole lot of depth to many of them. Familiarity was gained by exposure to them and how the story carried them along. The characters that were fleshed out better were known through dialogue, which, at times, was where McDowell really excelled. The form moved towards a deeper engagement with the world into which its horrific elements intrude. It traced with greater precision the emotional and intellectual responses of its characters to that intrusion. It evoked more of the ways in which the horror’s disruption might be made manifest. Following the deaths from and the desertions during the battle, the city watch only contains some forty-four hundred men, [34] where it had numbered six thousand before. [4]