Favorite Horror Stories: "Miss Mack" by Michael McDowell (1986)

Do you wish it could be Halloween all year long? Have I got a story for you!

There's no doubt that the king of the horror paperback original is Alabama-born Michael McDowell. His Avon titles from the early 1980s are all must-reads, and I'm sure you know them (and if you don't, fix that posthaste): The Amulet, The Elementals, the six-volume Blackwater series, and more, and he even wrote the original screenplays for both Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas. I can hardly believe he wrote no more horror novels after 1983, and his death in 1999 of an AIDS-related illness put an end to one of the greatest runs in the genre. McDowell may have been a master of horror, yet he wrote fewer than a dozen short stories, and none of them seem to get mentioned when his name comes up among fans. But one of those stories should, and it is called "Miss Mack."

First appearing in the 1986 anthology edited by Alan Ryan, titled Halloween Horrors, natch, "Miss Mack" was only published again in The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Vol. 1 (2016). Well-chosen, guys! My initial read of it was in 2015, and it's one of the few stories that I've come across in recent years that won't leave me be. When I think about it, I get a twisty snake-like chill up my spinal column. Stripped of all the excess pages of a novel, McDowell is able to get down and get dirty in around 20 pages.

It's 1957, in the small town of Babylon, Alabama, and Miss Mack has arrived there from another even smaller town called Pine Cone (McDowell fans will well recall these blighted places). Although she is neither old nor young, fat, pig-faced, and gives "the impression of a large piece of farm machinery that had forsaken both farm and field," McDowell does not offer her up as an object of pity or scorn; her worst habit is drinking warm Coke by the caseful and not knowing much Alabama history. Folks know her as the long-time assistant of the photographer of grammar school children in this Southern region. When that fellow dies, she returns to Babylon and asks, nay states outright to the school principal, in a perfect example of go-get-'em-gumption, "Mr. Hill, I want you to give me a job." Boy, try that today!

Knowing a good teacher when he sees one, Mr. Hill in fact does give her a job, teaching the third grade. She gets a small apartment between the library and the Coke bottling factory. Everybody loves her. She teaches fractions and the Alabama state song, and plays a mean dodgeball with the "manliest" little boys, flinging it so hard at them it puts them "right flat out on the ground." Boy, try that today! 

Miss Mack befriends 22-year-old Janice Faulk, the other third-grade teacher. It is a study in opposites: bulky, tennis-shoe-wearing Miss Mack and neat, petite, doll-like Miss Faulk. But they get along very well, discussing school issues together, having dinner together, endless talking, even taking little nightly road jaunts in which Miss Faulk shouts at truckers they drive up alongside, "Do you want to race Miss Mack?" Sounds like a great time. 

But you know who's not having a great time? Mr. Hill, who's got designs on pretty Miss Faulk, and didn't he give her a prize job, teaching the best, most well-behaved students, and doesn't she owe him something for that? Miss Faulk is "just the sort of impressionable young woman to imagine that such favors ought to be returned, with much considerable interest." Now McDowell does an interesting bit of sleight-of-hand, some foreshadowing that a careless reader might miss. Mr. Hill tells his mother, a widow living a place called Sweet Gum Head (I haven't looked it up to see if it's a real place in Alabama but it sure sounds like it could be), that he intends to marry Miss Faulk, and dear old mom tells him not to wait. But Mr. Hill waits, and it's a mistake.

The next time Mrs. Hill spoke to her son on the subject of Miss Faulk—the following Halloween—Mr. Hill listened carefully. And he did exactly what his mother told him to do.

Old Mrs. Hill is one of McDowell's classic evil matriarchs as we've read of in virtually all his novels. Indeed, this little story could be a sort of narrative aside that we never see in one of his other books. Although she never appears on-stage, as it were, she obviously controls Mr. Hill. This friendship of Miss Mack and Miss Faulk is getting in the way of Mr. Hill's having a nice, pretty wife. And Mrs. Hill, we take it through inference, wants her son to have a nice, pretty wife. Why, it's what any good mother wants for her son. They have "no intention of allowing his comfortable plans to be thwarted by a fat woman with greasy black hair and a face like a pig's."

Now Miss Mack and Miss Faulk love to drive out to secluded Gavin Pond some miles away, fishing and enjoying one another's company after the long school week. Mr. Hill casually mentions to Miss Mack that his mother lives out that way, and maybe one Sunday afternoon on his way back from visiting her he could stop by while Miss Mack and Miss Faulk are fishing. Miss Mack says politely, "I wish you would." She has no reason to suspect anything untoward of Mr. Hill; but his mother is another story: in her Southern travels over the years, she's "heard stories about that old woman."

Now it's Halloween weekend, and the women plan one last getaway before the weather grows too cold to enjoy the pond. Miss Faulk reminds Mr. Hill about visiting them on their fishing trip, and he replies, "Didn't I tell you, Janice? You gone be needed here at the school Saturday." Miss Faulk tells Miss Mack she has to stay to help with the children's Halloween party, and encourages Miss Mack to go on ahead without her, and Miss Mack makes her promise to come on Sunday, "and you bring me some Halloween candy. I sure do love Snickers, and they go great with Coca-Cola." (They do!) Miss Mack sets off to the pond alone...

And now the spoilers below:  

Having successfully separated the two women, Mr. Hill, as he said, stops by to see Miss Mack at the pond, telling her his mother drew him a map of the out-of-the-way area. "My mama has heard all about you, Miss Mack. My mama is old, but she is interested in a great many things." And Miss Mack herself has heard about old Mrs. Hill, and "that the things that Mrs. Hill interested herself in withered up and died."

As he leaves, Mr. Hill sprinkles the cindered, foul-smelling remains of some thing "recently dead or even still living" in the tracks that lead out of the wooded pond area, reads an incantation from a piece of yellow paper, burns the October page from a calendar, and smashes a stopwatch and a compass in the ashes. He drives away, back to the school... back to Miss Faulk.

Miss Mack awakes, ready to start her day, but something is amiss: it should be 6 am, but the sky is still black and the moon has not moved. The radio says it's 2 in the morning. She tries to drive out but can't find the turnoff to the main road. She walks through the woods but keeps ending up back at the pond and the trailer she stays in. She sleeps. She wakes up again and it is still 2 am and the moon has not moved—still Halloween night.

I believe that to be effective, horror has to affect the innocent. The story has to end unhappily. And "Miss Mack" features both elements. McDowell is often merciless to his most undeserving characters, and that's what makes his work so unexpectedly hard-hitting. The image of Miss Mack unable to find her way out of Gavin Pond, of waking up again and again in the middle of the night, running out of food and fuel, is to me so nightmarish I can barely stand it, it makes me sick to my stomach. 

"Miss Mack" is McDowell in miniature, everything he does so well just on a small scale: perfectly paced, Southern locale, strong, capable women, weak and cruel men, and manipulative mothers from hell itself. I only wish McDowell had offered us more of these evil little treats, at Halloween time or any other.

Favorite Horror Stories: "His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood" (1990)

Few writers in horror during the genre's Eighties heyday had a knack for writing about people who lived in any kind of minority subculture, whether ethnic or artistic. How could it be otherwise? Horror was mainstream, horror was marketed towards middle America, and for the most part espoused those middle American values and identities. It wasn’t really till Clive Barker that horror fiction acknowledged, if not outright embraced, these "alternative lifestyles." A few short years later it was Poppy Z. Brite who wrote fiction composed almost solely of young outcasts, usually gay or bisexual young men, often musicians or artists, living in the demimonde of several intersectional non-mainstream cultures. 

 

Arriving on the scene after publishing a smattering of short works in various horror magazines, with blurbs attesting to greatness by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Dan Simmons, Brite published two novels with Dell Abyss and a third after the Abyss line folded, then seemed to ease away from the genre, returning only within the last decade a transman named Billy Martin; Brite is still however the name he uses professionally.  

 

Brite's specialty was adding a fresh flavor of doomed romance to various well-known horror scenarios. Gothic, but not in the sense of night-gowned women running from castles, but in the aesthete, decadent, libertine sense of Wilde, Beardsley, Baudelaire, Klimt, Rocky Horror, Siouxsie and the Banshees. Jaded, plagued by ennui, even if it was mostly a pose, these characters were arty, amoral teens and college-age kids hanging out in filthy ill-lit nightclubs, wearing skin-tight black, Doc Martens, funeral priestly collars, and smudged eye makeup. Established horror writers were old and boring, they wrote about the kids’ parents dealing with demons and rising property taxes. Writers like that wouldn’t be out drinking and clubbing till 4am listening to Bauhaus and Christian Death, chain-smoking, drugging, fucking (and then, since many of Brite’s stories were set in North Carolina, eating at Waffle House).

Thirty years ago, I was knocked out when I read Brite’s 1990 tale, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.” First published in an essential, groundbreaking original anthology of the era, Thomas Monteleone's Borderlands, it exemplifies Brite’s worldview and artistic mien from the first sentence: “To the treasure and the pleasures of the grave,” said my friend Louis, and raised the goblet of absinthe to me in drunken benediction. As I read, the story seemed vaguely familiar—oh, yes, it's a retelling of Lovecraft's “The Hound,” one of his non-mythos works that showcased his (intellectual only!) love for overripe, purple decadence. Brilliantly, Brite updated the setting and our "protagonists" are now two macabre-minded young men of the 1980s who live in a home decorated like, perhaps, an Edward Gorey illustration. 

Evoking a Goth version of Withnail and I, these guys are “dreamers of a dark and restless sort.” They live in orphaned Louis’s “ancestral home in Baton Rouge… on the edge of a vast swamp, the plantation house loom[ing] sepulchrally out of the gloom that surrounded it always.” Striving for the extremes of experience, a sort Blakean “road of excess,” or maybe just good ol’ sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll salvation, they search in vain:

Both of us were dissatisfied with everything. We drank straight whiskey and declared it too weak. We took strange drugs, but the visions they brought us were of emptiness, mindless, slow decay. The books we read were dull… the music we heard was never loud enough, never harsh enough to stir us… For all the impression the world made upon us, our eyes might have dead black holes in our heads.

Brite's first collection of stories, Penguin UK, mid 1990s?

These jaded fops of the nighttime world seem lost, about to waste away, when Louis suggests an ultimate transgression: grave-robbing. How charmingly quaint! Their grave-robbing booty becomes a monstrous museum:

We always returned home with crates full of things no man had been meant to possess. We head of a girl with violet eyes who had died in some distant town; not seven days later we had those eyes in an ornate cut-glass jar, pickled in formaldehyde… we scraped bone dust and nitre from the bottoms of ancient coffins; we stole the barely withered heads and hands of children fresh in their graves… I had not taken seriously Louis’s talk of making love in a charnel-house—but neither had I reckoned on the pleasure he could inflict with a femur dipped in rose-scented oil.

What transpires after the two acquire a voodoo fetish (“a polished sliver of bone, or a tooth, but what fang could have been so long, so sleekly honed, and still have somehow retained the look of a human tooth?”) is almost beside the point; Brite is less interested in the way of plot or narrative than in weird flights of atmospheric prose and darkened vibes that go on for days: the lushness, the eroticization of every aspect of the environs, is Brite’s raison d’etre. Sex and death intermingle like the elemental forces they are, lusty and deranged beneath a cool, composed exterior. In his prose there whispers not only the archaisms of Lovecraft, but the pulp poetry of Bradbury, the slick sensuality of Anne Rice, the transgressive sex acts of William Burroughs. Brite slowly envelopes the reader in a cloak of lush midnight velvet, a world beyond the good and evil forces that the horror genre obliviously fooled itself with.

“His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood” hit me in the solar plexus, quenching a thirst I’d only just begun to have, and making me hate living my small culture-less New Jersey town even more. I was thrilled to read about a subculture I felt a kinship with. Few horror stories affected me like this, combining the familiar horror stylings I loved with characters that weren’t so far removed from myself in a world I was eager to engage in. And Poppy Z. Brite was already there, lighting the candles, showing the way, serving the absinthe.

Postscript: I debated between writing about this story and 1992's “Calcutta, Lord of Nerves,” from Still Dead. The latter story I may like even more, is even more accomplished in its beautiful, nightmarish visions, but “Wormwood” was the very first Brite I read, so I opted to revisit that experience. Read my review of the collection Wormwood (originally titled Swamp Foetus), which includes both stories, and others, all excellent.

The Tor Paperbacks of John Farris

It wasn't only Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, and Charles L. Grant whose books were adorned with garish and graphic paperback covers when published by Tor--check out the '80s output from John Farris! Some titles, like The Fury, Shatter, The Captors, and All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (check out snaky Ann-Margaret on that one!), were from the 1970s and then reprinted by Tor once Farris had signed with that publisher. He was quite prolific then, and still writes even as he nears 80 (Tor published his latest novel, High Bloods, just a few years ago).

Scare Tactics (1989, cover art by Carol Russo). A collection of short fiction. The cover "demon" was also used as the icon for Tor's horror line.

Catacombs (1987/orig. 1981, cover art by James Warren). I tried reading this one, not really my thing, although it was well-written. Apparently it's a kinda-sorta retelling of King Solomon's Mines.

The Axman Cometh (1989). Was Farris an O'Neill fan? In the intro, Farris instructs readers to read this one in a single sitting. Don't know why (although one Goodreads reviewer suspects it's so you'll miss cracks in plotting and some really poor writing!).

The Uninvited (1987/orig. 1982, cover art by John Melo). King quote, check! Not related to the 1940s supernatural chiller of the same title. Dig how the ghost likes a nice button-down.

The Captors (1985, orig. 1971). Probably could not quite get away with this kind of cover art today.

Minotaur (1985). Looks like a globe-trotting political thriller. I wonder if there's an actual minotaur at the center of it all?!

Nightfall (1987). Great Southern Gothic cover!

Son of the Endless Night (1986, cover by John Melo). I read this one a few years back; it's awesome in that over-the-top '80s-horror way.

Wildwood (1986). Do yourself a solid and watch this TV promo for the paperback, featuring Zacherle! OMG I wish more horror paperback publishers had done this.

Sharp Practice (1988, orig. 1974) Love the Looney Tunes-style imagery, absurd as it is.

Shatter (1986, orig. 1981) Nobody stayed up late working on this cover.

Fiends (1990, cover by John Melo). According to the PorPor Books blog, not a must-read.

The Fury (1985, orig. 1976, cover by John Melo) The novel that made Farris's career. Melo was a master of depicting '80s hair, wasn't he?

I have most of these on my bookshelf; I really need to get to reading 'em!

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.

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..." 

The Amulet by Michael McDowell (1979): The Valancourt Books Edition

Good news, vintage horror fiction fans: Michael McDowell's debut 1979 horror novel The Amulet has been brought back into print by specialty publisher Valancourt Books. As you can see, it boasts an introduction by another TMHF fave, the now-retired Poppy Z. Brite, which features some background on the writing of the novel and McDowell himself. Also of note: to my great surprise and complete delight, quotes from this blog are featured both on the back of the book - I've become a blurb! - as well as in Brite's intro. What! It's true. Anyway, I don't think you'll be disappointed if you drop a few bucks for this nicely-produced title from a publisher who knows just what it's doing. We can hope that more of McDowell's incredible '80s horror fiction will be treated in just the same way. Purchasing info here.