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diane 's review for:
Blackwater: The Complete Saga
by Michael McDowell
I...don’t know what to make of this book. It’s strange as hell and for two thirds of it I really liked it. But it’s long and repetitious and not at all satisfying at the end.
Elinor is a strange river creature who appears in Perdido, Alabama after the great flood and marries into the Caskey family and kills a few people along the way. This isn’t a horror novel (though it has a few scenes, it’s more of a Southern family saga where periodically people turn into river monsters. There’s rape (both times resulting in babies). There’s unbelievable wealth, none of it shared with the generations of a black family that’s doing all the work. Some of Elinor’s victims haunt the place, but only sometimes, for no given reason, and only the white ones. (The black ones are never mentioned again.)
I did enjoy lots of it: matriarch machinations, how some characters changed. But it went on for way too long, and I didn’t care how rich everyone got.
Elinor is a strange river creature who appears in Perdido, Alabama after the great flood and marries into the Caskey family and kills a few people along the way. This isn’t a horror novel (though it has a few scenes, it’s more of a Southern family saga where periodically people turn into river monsters. There’s rape (both times resulting in babies). There’s unbelievable wealth, none of it shared with the generations of a black family that’s doing all the work. Some of Elinor’s victims haunt the place, but only sometimes, for no given reason, and only the white ones. (The black ones are never mentioned again.)
I did enjoy lots of it: matriarch machinations, how some characters changed. But it went on for way too long, and I didn’t care how rich everyone got.