I found “Big Barbara” McCray, an alcoholic trapped in a loveless marriage to a power-hungry politician, to be quite sympathetic, but the standouts for me were Luker McCray and his daughter, India. Like all good horror authors, McDowell spends a great deal of time developing his cast of characters (for the most part – more on this later). He writes normal sentences, then strategically substitutes certain words (such as “gone” for “going,” and “cain’t” for “can’t”) to evoke rather than mimic the regional patois. It can be difficult to reproduce Southern dialects without the characters sounding like cartoons, but McDowell is such a skilled writer that this never happens. McDowell also has a marvelous ear for dialogue. The weather and other natural elements are characters of their own, and McDowell is equally adept at depicting the social realities of Southern living, with its “pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude.” And yet, what a fantastic book it is! McDowell’s work is often described as Southern Gothic, and that is accurate he does a fabulous job invoking the American South. It’s a book about malevolent spirits that kill people – no more, no less. Within, a deadly force lies in wait, longing for the chance to kill.Īs you may have surmised from the interview quoted above and the plot summary, this is not a novel that aims to make a grand philosophical statement. The third has been abandoned for decades and is slowly being buried beneath an ever-encroaching dune of fine white sand. One house belongs to the Savages, the second to the McCrays. Following the death of matriarch Marian Savage, the families retreat to their summer getaway, Beldame, a remote almost-island on the Alabama panhandle where three Victorian houses rise along the beach. The Elementals concerns two Alabama families bound by marriage, the Savages and the McCrays. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.” “I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. “I am a commercial writer and I’m proud of that,” McDowell noted in the 1985 interview book Faces of Fear. These days, McDowell is mostly remembered for his contributions to the Tim Burton films Beetlejuice (1988) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), but he was also, to quote Peter Straub, “one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country.” He was extremely prolific, writing more than a dozen novels and numerous screenplays in the 1980s alone.
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