The Amulet by Michael McDowell (1979): Better Believe Somebody's Gonna Get Hurt Tonight

Michael McDowell's first paperback original horror novel from Avon Books is, simply, a must-read for us horror fiction fans. Set in Alabama during the Vietnam War era, The Amulet begins with a devastating moment of violence on an army firing range and ends with a chill whisper as the circle closes. In between is an exquisitely drawn depiction of class and racial strife in small-town Southern life... and death. The first five or six chapters are told with little to no dialogue, just McDowell masterfully spinning a tapestry of the harsh realities of the unforgiving people and landscape of Pine Cone, Alabama.

But it could be said also that there is a great vitality in the mean-spiritedness of the town's inhabitants. Sometimes they are creatively cruel to one another, and there were seasons in which Pine Cone was an exciting place to live--if you were a spectator, and not a victim.

Original 1982 UK paperback

Twenty-year-old Sarah Howell works on the assembly line in the munitions factory, endlessly putting in three screws into the rifles that will go off to the boys fighting on the foreign front lines. Her husband Dean was to be one of them, but it's what happens to him in the prologue that sets the horrific events in motion. He isn't killed but he might as well be dead; his face is swathed in bandages and his brain has been nearly pulverized. Sarah and Dean's mother Jo care for him now in Jo's home, and Sarah bitterly realizes her permanent widowhood in which she must always bear her husband's corpse at her side.

1996 UK reprint

A word about Jo Howell: repulsive. She's Jabba the Hut in human form, an obese, ugly, lazy, hateful, petty, manipulative, bickering old bitch who makes Sarah's life hell... and with the titular piece of jewelry that she gives to an old friend of Dean's, she practically razes the town and the factory down to the very dirt that people strive so hard to rise above. She may profess ignorance of the powers of the amulet and its origins, but Sarah pieces together the evidence of Jo's outrage at Dean's condition and what made him that way, and the unbelievably violent and meaningless deaths of the innocent that tear through Pine Cone this hot summer of 1965.

Take a look at the cover image at top from Avon (thanks to the great fantasy illustrator Don Ivan Punchatz). You're getting exactly that! The amulet gets passed inadvertently from victim to victim; Sarah nearly goes out of her mind with fear trying to figure out just how that happens. With her superstitious next-door neighbor Becca, they try to track its path, but can never quite manage to stop the amulet's power. Effortlessly McDowell lets us into the minds of the people who wear it, and how it suddenly makes them commit the most horrible deeds - horrible deeds that seem all too rational to the people who perpetrate them: the mother who cannot stand her screaming children, the wife who realizes her husband is cheating on her, the teenage babysitter who just knows how to discipline an infant...

Yep, The Amulet is a near-perfect example of a paperback original horror novel—even its cover art is a great representation of the genre at the time. Author McDowell graces us with a truly despicable villain, a sympathetic heroine, a vivid and engaging sense of place and time, and yes, scenes of unsettling, inventive violence and horror and bloodshed. The innocent suffer, yet perhaps no one's hands are clean; the factory that creates mechanisms of death and employs so many in the town stands in for our complicity in the violence that stains not just faraway lives but those in our very own homes.

Obtain The Amulet by any means necessary.

Quite literally, The Amulet makes a great beach read!