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stevendedalus 's review for:
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga
by Michael McDowell
This book is like slowly sinking into a sweet-smelling, magical swamp until it fills every pore of you and your lungs and almost suffocates. You never really come up for air.
It's not a horror as much as it is a magical Southern Gothic, a dark magical realism of Alabama marshes. The magical elements ebb and flow like the tide and the violence, gory and jagged, thrashes briefly before subsiding.
It's really a multi-generational story of one of those old matriarchal southern families that full of eccentricity and dusty manners and an aversion to the physicality of the world. Each character feels deep and interesting, and they evolve and change in expected and unexpected ways. It all feels wetly organic and seductive and the river monster is almost incidental, just a bit of genre for that extra frisson.
It has some issues of earlier popular fiction, the sidelining of black characters and the crutch of sexual violence as a plot and character point, but that sort of seedy southern sneer just adds to the louche environment.
McDowell's strengths as a writer are deep: his mood-setting is unparalleled and the sense of place, time, and character feel mustily lived-in. There's no one better at conjuring a slightly decrepit world.
It's popular fiction with literary depth and stylistic brilliance and the man really needs more respect and recognition for his powers. It's long but it is an entire mood.
It's not a horror as much as it is a magical Southern Gothic, a dark magical realism of Alabama marshes. The magical elements ebb and flow like the tide and the violence, gory and jagged, thrashes briefly before subsiding.
It's really a multi-generational story of one of those old matriarchal southern families that full of eccentricity and dusty manners and an aversion to the physicality of the world. Each character feels deep and interesting, and they evolve and change in expected and unexpected ways. It all feels wetly organic and seductive and the river monster is almost incidental, just a bit of genre for that extra frisson.
It has some issues of earlier popular fiction, the sidelining of black characters and the crutch of sexual violence as a plot and character point, but that sort of seedy southern sneer just adds to the louche environment.
McDowell's strengths as a writer are deep: his mood-setting is unparalleled and the sense of place, time, and character feel mustily lived-in. There's no one better at conjuring a slightly decrepit world.
It's popular fiction with literary depth and stylistic brilliance and the man really needs more respect and recognition for his powers. It's long but it is an entire mood.