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A review by octavia_cade
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
dark
medium-paced
4.0
This isn't quite a haunted house novel. Rather, it's a cursed house novel, I think, because what's rattling round Beldame - the elementals of the title - are less ghosts than amorphous monstrosities made of sand. Which sounds absolutely ridiculous, but really it's quite disturbing.
It's the sand that does it. The rest of the book is your typical Southern Gothic, but the setting sets it apart. On a spit of land in rural Alabama are three old Victorian houses. Isolated, surrounded by sand and water, the dunes of the spit are slowly swallowing the houses. The bright, almost bleached landscape, the sense of unending, torpid heat, and the insinuation of sand into everything in and around the houses - flower bulbs, sugar bowls, etc. - and the growing suspicion that the sand, or something in it, is both sentient and malevolent... it's just very creepy.
The only other sand-based horror I've read is The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe - very different from this, but it's making me wonder about sand and horror. There might be an article in it.
It's the sand that does it. The rest of the book is your typical Southern Gothic, but the setting sets it apart. On a spit of land in rural Alabama are three old Victorian houses. Isolated, surrounded by sand and water, the dunes of the spit are slowly swallowing the houses. The bright, almost bleached landscape, the sense of unending, torpid heat, and the insinuation of sand into everything in and around the houses - flower bulbs, sugar bowls, etc. - and the growing suspicion that the sand, or something in it, is both sentient and malevolent... it's just very creepy.
The only other sand-based horror I've read is The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe - very different from this, but it's making me wonder about sand and horror. There might be an article in it.