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benapplebydean 's review for:
Blackwater: The Complete Saga
by Michael McDowell
A decades-spanning Gothic saga of love, loss, prosperity, disaster and swamp creatures, Blackwater is like nothing else I've ever encountered.
Covering the fortunes of the Caskey Family and their home-town of Perdido, Blackwater takes us from a post-WWI hamlet and lumber mill all the way into the 1960s, showing the family's births, deaths, marriages and years-long petty feuds.
So far so normal, but for the fact that our heroine, the upstart young woman who marries the family's favourite son, is also a shape-changing, child-eating river-monster; although this doesn't curb her ambitions to further her husband's career, undermine her domineering mother-in-law or protect her own mismatched children.
McDowell also conjures atmosphere incredibly well - the quirks and stratifications of Alabama society, the claustrophobic thickets of the trees and swamps, the slow decay of sprawling wooden houses and the ever-present thrum of the Blackwater river. The prose never takes centre stage - it doesn't wrest your attention from the characters or bombard you with imagery - but every page holds a sleepy menace that's all the more powerful for its understatement.
Imagine the long-spun family saga from Gone with the Wind or One Hundred Years of Solitude crossed with the social warfare of Mapp and Lucia but starring the Creature from the Black Lagoon and you might begin to get an idea of this extraordinary book.
Covering the fortunes of the Caskey Family and their home-town of Perdido, Blackwater takes us from a post-WWI hamlet and lumber mill all the way into the 1960s, showing the family's births, deaths, marriages and years-long petty feuds.
So far so normal, but for the fact that our heroine, the upstart young woman who marries the family's favourite son, is also a shape-changing, child-eating river-monster; although this doesn't curb her ambitions to further her husband's career, undermine her domineering mother-in-law or protect her own mismatched children.
McDowell also conjures atmosphere incredibly well - the quirks and stratifications of Alabama society, the claustrophobic thickets of the trees and swamps, the slow decay of sprawling wooden houses and the ever-present thrum of the Blackwater river. The prose never takes centre stage - it doesn't wrest your attention from the characters or bombard you with imagery - but every page holds a sleepy menace that's all the more powerful for its understatement.
Imagine the long-spun family saga from Gone with the Wind or One Hundred Years of Solitude crossed with the social warfare of Mapp and Lucia but starring the Creature from the Black Lagoon and you might begin to get an idea of this extraordinary book.