Blackwater VI: Rain by Michael McDowell (1983): You're Gone Make Me Lonesome When You Go

Power wills death itself in the final chapter of Blackwater, the six-volume saga of Southern life in a small Alabama town called Perdido. Rain (Avon Books, June 1983) has Michael McDowell concluding with a drenching torrent that seems to drown the whole world, or at least Perdido itself, and for its inhabitants that's enough. I'll tell you I was a bit bummed to come to final chapter of this weird, Southern Gothic-lite saga of the wealthy Caskey clan and their family entanglements, both natural and not, as I've been reading Blackwater slowly over a year and a half. Honestly, I think I did it wrong: the whole series comes to a total of around 1,100 pages so I spaced my reading out, but now I really wish I'd read them  closer together so I could've gotten fully immersed in them. Oh well. (Some spoilers in this review).

 

Michael McDowell (1950 - 1999)

Now set in the 1960s, we begin with the conflict between spinsterly invalid Sister Caskey and her niece Miriam (daughter of Elinor, the inhuman--or more than human--woman who married into the Caskeys), who runs the family sawmills and has enriched their bank accounts immeasurably, and continues to do so. Sister had taken to bed on account of a supposed weakness in her legs. And in order to avoid her husband, she had kept to that bed, willing her legs to wither... More and more demanding and dismissive and dramatic, it is noted Sister is becoming more and more like the last Caskey matriarch Mary-Love, whom nobody much misses save Sister. In a moment of rational decision-making she's known for, Miriam decides she will marry milquetoasty Malcom Strickland, the family closest to the Caskeys. 

This upsets Sister and she insists they hold off the wedding, but Miriam will hear none of it. The wedding goes on, an enormous affair to which all Perdido and many important folks known through Miriam's successful business dealings are invited. Sister stays in her room, and while Oscar--Miriam's father, Elinor's husband--sits at her bedside comforting her, Sister passes. Out of spite, it seems!

The odd family tradition of giving up children to other family members continues: in this last volume, Billy Bronze and (the late--or, more accurately, the "late") Frances's daughter Lilah, first living with her grandmother Elinor, comes to live with Miriam and Malcolm, as they cannot bear their own children. With Miriam's guidance and to Elinor's dismay, Lilah begins exhibiting the willful imperiousness of Mary-Love and Sister; she toys with the affections of young Tommy Lee. He lived with his mother Lucille and her "partner" Grace Caskey on an enormous farm, but now lives with his grandmother Queenie Strickland (Malcom's mother--got all that?). Elinor wishes Lilah and Tommy Lee would marry and produce offspring to keep Miriam and Malcolm company as they age, and ensure the Caskey clan continues. This is not to be; Lilah will not be a pawn in the Caskey game.

It gradually became known in Babylon and Perdido that Tommy Lee had been disappointed in love. He had hoped, and all his family had hoped, that he would marry Lilah Bronze; Lilah, herself trained by Miriam, had done a sort of Miriam-like thing and married herself to a man with name that was two inches long and who declared on a stack of Bibles that he would never set foot in Alabama again.

Lilah even gets Tommy Lee to go to college so she, still a high schooler, can be invited to the awesome and socially important frat parties. With Tommy Lee gone, Queenie Strickland cannot bear to be in her house alone; strange noises assault her while she tries to sleep. One night she hears bootsteps outside and when she peeks out and sees it was Carl Strickland, her husband, who had been dead these thirty years, drowned in the black waters of the Perdido. *shiver* Queenie is found cold and dead the next morning, two quarters, each bearing the date 1929, were pressed over her eyes, and the key to the house was stuck in her mouth.

Hardcover omnibus editions from SF Book Club

McDowell engages in more of his patented quiet, weird, Southern Gothic scenes of horror and the macabre: Queenie's torment and death, and Tommy Lee returns and while boating through the swamp has the fright of his life when he's attacked by a creature unlike any swamp denizen he's ever known. The voices that blind, aging Oscar hears, of his mother Mary-Love and a little boy who died in the Perdido decades before, draw him into a dark embrace.The ugly death of this good, caring man by monstrous hands that stink of that river is heartbreaking. In his home Billy Bronze hears voices too, of his late wife Frances and Nerita, the daughter he never knew who lives and hungers in dark waters, singing and talking with Elinor in her room. In the morning the stairs' carpet is damp with river water. He is not afraid however:

The three voices--female but not human, Billy thought--went on for more than an hour, lasting as long as the rain. But as the rain slackened, so did the three voices. When the water was no more than an irregular dripping from the eaves, the singing stopped altogether. Billy had long ago lost the habit of prayer, but now he prayed for the clouds to return, and to open up above the house in hope that voices might again unite in song.

Then the rains come, long and incessant, and the government arrives and sees the levees will not hold and insists on evacuating Perdido. Most leave, but not Billy Bronze, not long-time family help Zaddie Sapp, not Elinor Caskey, who now lays dying in her bed. She has sent everyone but those two away, and the waters rise and rise on the Caskey house as Billy and Zaddie keep a death watch on this mysterious matriarch whose connection to those waters is the stuff of myth and legend... and the end comes for our family saga in the manner we knew from the start: Without further heralding, the water set about to wipe Perdido from the face of the earth.

1985 Corgi UK edition, lovely cover art by Terry Oakes

Yeah, I was bummed when it was over. For all its pluses, however, I don't quite rate Blackwater as highly as I do McDowell's standalone novels The Amulet, Cold Moon over Babylon, and The Elementals; I could've used even more horror or supernatural strangeness in these 1,100 pages, but that's just me. Sometimes the narrative drive is listless; the writing underdone; the family drama too drawn out. But there's plenty to enjoy too, in this unique family saga unlike anything else published in 1980s horror fiction. For modern readers Blackwater exists for Kindle; I believe Valancourt Books is trying to publish the series in trade paperback as they have two of McDowell's other novels; and Centipede Press is set to put out a schmancy illustrated hardcover as well next year. In whatever form you choose to read of the Caskey family's strange and sodden journey through the 20th century, in vintage paperback or as ebook, I think you will agree it is one worth taking, and that Michael McDowell is the perfect guide.

My review of the entire Blackwater series is on Tor.com; go here to read it.

Summer of Sleaze Goes Southern Gothic

I finally finished Michael McDowell's epic 1983 Southern saga of the Caskey family, Blackwater, and posted a review at Tor.com as part of the Summer of Sleaze series. Hope you dig it!

Above illustration is by Terry Oakes for the UK paperback of Blackwater V: The Fortune.

Blackwater V: The Fortune by Michael McDowell (1983): A Newborn Baby with Wild Wolves All Around It

The Caskey family saga may be coming to a close but you wouldn't know it by the activity seen in this fifth volume of the Blackwater series, The Fortune (Avon, May 1983). Miriam Caskey is indeed amassing her family's fortune by hiring a Texas oil company to drill into the Perdido swampland on their property, after her estranged mother, the ever-mysterious Elinor, reveals that beneath its inky roiling depths there are pools of crude worth countless riches. How does she know? She just does. Meanwhile Queenie Strickland receives her erstwhile son Malcolm back into the family's bosom after being assumed missing in action, or even dead, after running away four years earlier.  Miriam's sister Frances gives birth to a daughter, and Frances's husband Billy Bronze oversees the accounting books of the Caskey mill, astonishing each family member by declaring just how much money they have during these post-WWII years.

However not everything is going so swimmingly for every Caskey: Elvennia Caskey, known as Sister, is distressed to learn that her husband Early Haskew - who married Sister in The Levee - will soon be home from Germany, after helping the Allies building bridges. She has no interest in seeing him again: "Why in the world did so many people die in the war, and Early's coming back alive!" Sister enlists the help of their longtime black servant, Ivey Sapp, but this results in a humiliating accident (see the broken bottle at the bottom of the steps on the Avon cover, illustrated by Wayne D. Barlowe). Poor Billy Bronze fears Frances is growing apart from him and their newborn baby Lilah, and even though he accompanies his sister-in-law Miriam on the profitable business trips to Texas, he grows insecure about his position in the Caskey brood. Once, he was the golden boy: 

When he set his mind to something, he walked right in at the door and did it. When he had got it into his head to become part of the Caskey family, he had picked out a marriageable daughter, wooed her, won her, married her, and got her pregnant in order to produce more Caskeys. The Family 's admiration for him was unbounded.

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But now Frances disappears each afternoon to swim deeply and luxuriously in the Perdido waters, leaving her daughter to the care of Elinor... much as Elinor had given up her first daughter, Miriam, to her own mother-in-law Mary-Love in the first volume. What happens to Frances as she visits those watery depths (illustrated nicely above, for the 1985 Corgi UK paperback cover)? She becomes almost a different person, something different altogether, which Billy notices. Sadly he is to have no part of her rejuvenation, and knows he will soon lose her. The day was chilly, but she was barefooted, bareheaded, and naked beneath her loosely gathered robe, having just come in from her swim. When he first saw her, she was smiling and radiant. But the smile faded the moment she glimpsed him the dimness of the corridor.

Reading The Fortune over several months, putting it down for a couple weeks then picking it up again, I found it middling in the series. As is his wont, Michael McDowell takes his time telling this story, focusing on details that some readers might find irrelevant or overly slight; even in this slim volume - not even 200 pages - the narrative is leisurely, with only a few spikes of real melodrama and mild horror. Tension is lacking in spots but that makes it kind of a cozy, informal historical read. As ever he's good at interpersonal relationships, drawing out the peculiarities of his characters and their insecurities, and he's best at evoking darkness and dread. Which I wish there had been more of... especially this:

Throughout the series, McDowell has whispered hints of a non-human origin for Elinor, a nature which has been passed on to Frances - witness Frances's strange supernatural revenge upon a rapist in The War. Their mythic kinship to one another and to the Perdido River speaks of Jungian shapeshifters, of ancient legends about the dark powers of women and water... and the children they bear. Lilah is not the only offspring Frances bears one night in The Fortune; there is another child too, one that Zaddie, Ivey Sapp's daughter, catches the merest glimpse of when assisting in the childbirth:

Zaddie turned to turn out the light, but as she was turning she glimpsed a second head emerging smoothly from Frances's quietly heaving body. It was greenish-gray, and it seemed to wobble. Zaddie saw two wide-open, perfectly round filmy eyes, and two round black holes where a nose ought to have been...

Two-volume hardcover

Science Fiction Book Club, 1983

Can there be any doubt where this strange creature will find its home, that it shares its mother's and grandmother's inhuman heritage, and that its mother will leave behind all the Caskeys and join it? We know when Elinor places this mewling newborn into Frances's arms for the first time:

"What's wrong with her?" Frances asked. "Why is she crying like this?"

"She's drowning," said Elinor.

"Drowning?!"

"In the air. She needs to be in water..." 

Blackwater IV: The War by Michael McDowell (1983): But Nothing Really Matters Much, It's Doom Alone That Counts

Using his considerable storytelling skills in The War, the fourth book (April 1983) in Blackwater, his pop-lit Southern-Gothic-lite paperback-original miniseries, author Michael McDowell tantalizes us with stronger, stranger glimpses of what goes on down there in Perdido, Alabama with that whole Caskey family. McDowell tells much of his grand tale at a far remove, describing the impact of WWII on the townspeople, particularly how this business of war fills the Caskey family coffers; Oscar Caskey signs a lucrative contract with the US government to produce much-needed items such as utility poles, and lord, as Stephen King might put it, how the money do roll in. His daughters, formerly estranged sisters Miriam and Frances, now in their late and young teen years respectively, form a speechless bond over car trips to the beach every morning. There, Frances - truly her mother Elinor's daughter - finds an exhilarating and illuminating connection to the sea. Other Caskey kids beget trouble, or look to the faraway war for a new frontier.

In general the Caskey children are growing up and moving on, falling in love and starting careers and seeking wartime assignments, all which bear hard on the previous generation, who are now facing growing gracelessly, hopelessly old, a losing proposition no matter how much money the family has. Some, like imperturbable Elinor (whose sudden appearance in Perdido during a flood began the tale entire), welcome these changes, and foresee a future of success and happiness never experienced during the reign of late-but-not-lamented matriarch Mary-Love Caskey. But aging Uncle James sees his beloved young nephew Danjo eventually shipped off to Germany, and worries and frets and foresees nothing but his own death...

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But then McDowell zooms in close for those intimate revelations so essential to the Blackwater saga. Miriam seems to be turning out like Mary-Love, full of secret plans withheld from the family, impatient, imperious. Servicemen hang around Perdido at a dancehall on the lake, much to Lucille Caskey's delight. James's daughter Grace, once a phys-ed instructor at a girls' school (yes, make of that exactly what you will) returns to Perdido and ends up discovering she loves the country life, using Caskey money to begin a small farm outside of town. A new character is introduced: Billy Bronze, a handsome and intelligent (but of course) North Carolina corporal stationed nearby. His strong character impresses Elinor, who every Sunday invites soldiers to the Caskey home for a hearty after-church meal. Billy, raised by an abusive albeit wealthy father, realizes the unique quality of the Caskeys, and guilelessly plans to marry into them.

But not only were there a great many Caskey women, the women were in control of the family. Billy had never seen anything like it, and the whole notion fascinated him. He loved being around the Caskeys, and had grown very quickly to love them all... Oscar seemed rather put upon, and might have been utterly powerless had he not enjoyed at least superficial control fo the mill. James Caskey had abdicated his rights entirely, and had become a kind of woman himself. Danjo was a strong, masculine boy, but one trained nevertheless to believe that real power and real prestige lay with women and not with men.

I saw lots of these in used bookstores in the early '90s... and never bought 'em.

"But wait!" I hear you saying; "I thought this was a novel of bloodcurdling horror - gimme the goods!" Well, there isn't a lot of horror at all, bloodcurdling or otherwise, in The War; nope, just a scant few moments that bode (un)well for the final forthcoming tomes: an old lunatic man confronts Frances about her mother's origins and the Blackwater river; two teens go missing when they are to report for army duty; a woman is raped and inhuman vengeance doled out. McDowell knows when to underplay and when to lay it all out on the table, sure, but I must report that The War isn't quite up to The Flood or The House in intensity, but neither is it as lackluster as The Levee. It's an easy, entertaining read, comfortable and satisfying. Not everything can be splatterpunk you know.

One last thing, and tell me if I'm crazy: early one morning I was lying in bed, thinking about The War and Blackwater in general, when it hit me: women, water, and the Y-shaped intersection of the rivers, evidenced by this map included in each book. Do you see it? Grove of live oaks? I mean... yeah. I'm not crazy!

Blackwater III: The House by Michael McDowell (1983): Power and Greed and Corruptible Seed

The story of the Caskeys, a grand and wealthy yet conflicted Southern family, is far from over: In The House (Avon, Mar 1983), the third book (of six) in the Blackwater series, author Michael McDowell happily returns to the quietly Gothic style, creeping unease, deft characterization, and shocking violence that made me such a fan of the first book, The Flood. The lack of most of these aspects, or their under-use, made the second in the series, The Levee, rather lackluster. Fortunately I trusted McDowell, continued on, and was rewarded with a fantastic little work of horror fiction.

It is now 1929, ten years after the events of The Flood: the Caskeys still preside over Perdido, Alabama in wealth, mystery, and prestige. Mary-Love Caskey reigns over her family with imperious passive-aggressiveness; her son Oscar and his wife Elinor (who arrived from nowhere, it seems, with the flood) raise their timid daughter Frances next door; her brother-in-law, the widowed James, raises his lovely daughter Grace alone; and Queenie Strickland, another relative, raises two unruly children and fears the return of her abusive husband Carl. They hardly notice the Great Depression. That strange crisis of faith and paper so many miles away is nothing compared to the violence Perdido experiences on that very day...

Despite a few "telling-not-showing" mis-steps in the first couple chapters that read more like back-cover copy or McDowell's own notes before fleshing them out, the novel deepens, if not broadens. The crisscrossing currents of emotional manipulation between Mary-Love and her daughter-in-law Elinor are believable as the latter subtly begins her ascent to the Caskey throne in order to control the family fortune:

There was no rancor in Elinor's voice. She spoke as if she stated obvious truths. The very baldness of Elinor's assertions wounded Mary-Love, who never looked at a thing directly, and now had no idea how to confront her daughter-in-law's unexpected forthrightness.

When Mary-Love suddenly falls ill, who is it that cares for her? It is Elinor who puts her to bed in the front room of her and Oscar's home, the room which so frightened their daughter at the end of The Levee, a closet from which emanates an unearthly light (see the cover)... and perhaps something more. Other strange things surface, sometimes literally: Caskey daughters Frances and Grace go for a boat ride to the source of the Perdido River, where all civilization seemed separated from this strange spot by space and time, and when the waters roil, a familiar visage appears from its red-tinged depths.

Rot and corruption arise and destroy weak men while vanity and self-delusion destroy weak women. Then there is the fate that befalls one character: mercilessly beyond all human endurance, an incident of monstrous woe and bodily destruction; truly one of the worst deaths I've ever read in horror fiction. Nearly Barkerian in its unexpected explicitness, I was pretty horrified. A real butt-clencher to be sure!

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

But all is not misery: I was charmed by the lives of widowed James Caskey and his young teenage daughter, Grace, and found the chapters about them a pleasure to read. The sweet and unaffected child Danjo Strickland, the result of Carl's rape of Queenie, goes to live with James after Grace reluctantly leaves for college (all the Caskeys live within yards of one another and have traded off children before). And it's always satisfying when someone like Mary-Love, a perfect example of imagined victimization, gets her comeuppance: when Oscar finally refuses to speak to her any longer after she turns down his request for money owed him to save the Caskey mill, it is particularly painful because it wasn't public; she therefore couldn't represent herself as a martyr.

I really had a blast reading The House this past weekend during a mini-vacation, swept up into its story and its people, McDowell's sure, even style, and the note of uber-creepiness upon which this book ended. I can only hope - and trust - that the rest of the Blackwater series is as horrifically satisfying.

Blackwater II: The Levee by Michael McDowell (1983): In the Darkness by the Riverbed...

A few years after The Flood, the first book in the Blackwater series from the late Michael McDowell, a man named Early Haskew comes to the small Alabama town of Perdido to engineer the construction of, of course, The Levee (Avon, Feb 1983). Accepting an invitation from matriarch Mary-Love Caskey, Early moves in with her and her 33-year-old spinster daughter known as Sister. Readers know that Early has stepped into a family riven by strife and competition and manipulation, and when he is "courted" by Sister the tension rises. Mary-Love's daughter-in-law Elinor Caskey takes a dim view of Early's work, denying that a flood will ever again rise in Perdido. What does the mysterious and willful Elinor, rescued from the flood by, and now wife of, Mary-Love's son Oscar, know? How could she ever know such a thing? Well...

Meanwhile, the children play: Grace Caskey, Zaddie Sapp, and John-Robert DeBordenave, the young, mentally feeble son of one of the prominent Perdido sawmill families. Oh, the small cruelties the other youngsters inflict upon him. But another cruelty awaits him, one that pales before the taunts of thoughtless children, a cruelty beneath a foggy moon at the black river's edge and in the arms of a grimly determined woman. Definitely one of the few high points of the novel.

John Robert turned his face slowly and sadly back to the river. He stared before him at the levee construction and the muddy water that flowed silent and black behind it. What little mind and consciousness the child possessed was being burned away...

All in all, though, I didn't like The Levee nearly as much as The Flood. I was expecting another bit of chilling mystery and quiet horror; what I got was a naturalistic family (melo)drama set in a small Alabama town in the 1920s. It's not really horror, as it focuses on the daily lives of its characters; only nominally does it feature the whispery supernatural aspects of the first volume. The story drifts along lazily without any real suspense in the conflicts between the various characters: Elinor and Early; two new characters, James Caskey's ex-sister-in-law Queenie Strickland and her thuggish husband Carl; Mary-Love and just about every other person in Perdido. Those conflicts are there, you just don't feel it, McDowell doesn't get under the skin where it counts.

1985 Corgi UK edition, cover art by Terry Oakes

McDowell has an easy understanding of the lengths to which some people - especially Southern women - will go to manipulate others in order to gain or regain power and respect and authority. It reads like a mild soap opera - everything is detailed in such a plain, straightforward manner that honestly it got boring, as if McDowell were simply biding time, building his dramatic arcs for later use. His style becomes more than serviceable and quite convincing when writing about the strange or supernatural, which this second volume mostly lacks. Despite my disappointment with The Levee overall, I haven't been put off the Blackwater series, and I look forward to finishing it in the new year. Speaking of the new year, I hope to acquire copies of his other novels, like Cold Moon over Babylon (1980) and Katie (1982).

Blackwater I: The Flood by Michael McDowell (1983): When You're Lost in the Rain and It's Eastertime Too

What Easter but that first in Jerusalem had dawned so bleakly, or stirred less hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the rising of that morning's sun?

It is the early morning of Easter Sunday, 1919, and the Perdido and Blackwater rivers of Perdido, Alabama have flooded the small town - leaving only the spires and roofs and chimneys of the town's buildings to be seen above the foul and debris-choked waters. But a small boat containing Oscar Caskey and his black servant Bray Sugarwhite, two men rowing through the wreckage looking for anyone who may not have fled to higher ground days before when the rains began. Suddenly, in an upper-story room of the Osceola Hotel, Oscar catches sight of a redheaded woman - whom he had not seen when he first glanced inside the room. She seems to appear instantaneously, out of nowhere. Upon pulling her into the boat, she says she has survived in this room since the flood began, having apparently slept through the warnings several days before. Bray is suspicious of this survivor, Elinor Dammert, while Oscar is awkwardly intrigued. And Elinor will bring suspicion and intrigue to Perdido; especially indeed to all the ladies of Perdido.

And so begins The Flood (Avon, Jan 1983), the first book of Blackwater, a serialized Southern gothic/horror saga from cult paperback horror writer Michael McDowell. The second chapter is simply titled "The Ladies of Perdido," and we meet them all, from every age and class and color, but at the top is not, as one might expect, Annie Bell Driver, the Baptist Hard-Shell minister, but Mary-Love Caskey, Oscar's mother and part owner of the Caskey sawmill fortune. There's also Sister Caskey, Mary-Love's young spinster daughter, and other women whose husbands run the two other sawmills in town. Gossip flies about Elinor and her burgeoning relationship with Oscar, Perdido's "first gentleman," a kind and courtly man employed by his uncle James, Mary-Love's brother-in-law, at the family lumber mill. Unsurprisingly he is perplexed by Elinor's mysterious arrival: 

"Why did you come to Perdido? Perdido is at the end of the earth. Who comes to Perdido but to write me a check for lumber?"
"I guess the flood brought me," Elinor laughed.
"Have you experienced a flood before this?"
"Lots," she replied. "Lots and lots..."

At 189 pages, The Flood is a solid read with McDowell's sure hand settling us into this genteel sawmill town now besieged by natural, and perhaps unnatural, tragedy. The machinations and manipulations of the Caskeys are fascinating as McDowell develops them economically, without getting bogged down in psych 101 or a backstory of neuroses. Mary-Love has a house built for the not-so-surprising marriage of Oscar and now-schoolteacher Elinor, but will not sign the deed over to them; Mary-Love keeps Sister always under her thumb in a contradictory position; Mary-Love attempts to sully James's erstwhile wife Genevieve's reputation as that of a selfish drunk. McDowell well understands Southern life: how the land and the rain and the flood stain lives, and how family power predominates, especially matriarchal power (which features strongly also in his The Amulet (1979) and The Elementals (1981)):

Oscar knew that Elinor was very much like his mother: strong-willed and dominant, wielding power in a fashion he could never hope to emulate. That was the great misconception about men... there were blinds to disguise the fact of men's real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn't control themselves... Oscar knew that Mary-Love and Elinor could think and scheme rings around him. They got what they wanted. In fact, every female on the census rolls of Perdido, Alabama got what she wanted. Of course no man admitted this; in fact, didn't even know it. But Oscar did...

If this makes Blackwater sound more like a soap opera than a horror novel, I can see why you'd think so. But fear not: the creeps come, oh do they. Quietly McDowell stacks mystery upon mystery in a precisely calculated manner that keeps the reader turning pages, without straining credibility. Mary Bell Driver discovers Elinor naked submerged in the muddy red waters of the Perdido, undergoing some transformation. A young boy is swept up into the powerful junction between the Blackwater and Perdido and drowns, perhaps by something that lives at the bottom of the whirlpool, where it grabbed you so tight your arms got broken and then it licked the eyeballs right out of your head. There are those things and more. The foreboding black, gray, and red menace of gloom and doom on the cover are no cheat; you get what's promised there. 

Michael McDowell (1950 - 1999)

So far, McDowell's got me hooked. In cheaper paperback originals - and some hardcover bestsellers - chapters end with ridiculous cliffhangers, but McDowell ends his on some oblique note of unease or flat statement of uncomfortable fact, whether it be death, dismemberment, or a stand of water oak trees planted by Elinor that seem to grow overnight. Unassumingly soap operatic in its human conflicts, it does not hammer home horror; it insinuates and alludes and caresses. I know I can trust him as an author. The situations and the characters drive the narrative, not the other way around, which makes The Flood so readable.

Don't know why I was never interested in the books when I used to see countless copies of them in my old used bookstore; besides those unique covers I guess I thought they were cheap. Without the guilt or cheapness, without falsity or contrivance, this first volume in the uniquely serialized Blackwater saga bodes very, very well for the rest of the series... and bodes very, very grimly for all of Perdido's drowning souls.