Bats Out of Hell by Guy N. Smith (1978): Wings of Pain Reach Out for You

Can you believe it's been over a decade since I read a Guy N. Smith novel?! Despite his having written a near countless number of books, none ever made it to the top of my to-read list. In my paperback collection I have maybe eight or so of his titles, some part of his infamous Crabs series, and others just random I've bought over the years. The itch was coming upon me to revisit the infamous pulp novelist, but I wanted something other than those giant crustaceans, so chose Bats Out of Hell (Signet/Nov 1979) from my shelves. Similar in size and shape to simultaneously-published Killer Crabs—both part of the many "animal attacks" works Signet put out back then—Bats is a sleek 150 pages or so, and doesn't muck about with unnecessary plot or character. Smith knew exactly what worked for him, and for that cool $1.75 price tag, he was gonna give it to ya.

We begin in a science lab at the Midlands Biological Research Center, smack-dab middle of beloved tourist spot Cannock Chase, acres of natural land. Against the wishes of the locals, this "ugly scar on the landscape" now is filled with scientists studying disease, ostensibly "to benefit the good of all mankind Except for... for this!" That emphatic "this" refers to the study subjects of Professor Brian Newman: bats. The poor experimental animals locked in cages, have been injected with disease, in a rage, flying futilely about, dying paralyzed, ugh, poor things. I'll let manly Prof. Newman himself explain the  method to the madness:

"The virus is a mutated one caused by experimenting. I've tried to determine the difference between bacterial and viral meningitis... I've never known the disease lead to madness or such awful agony. And I have created a new horror. A mutated virus! God knows how it happened... my God, how far could it spread... even humans? It doesn't bear thinking about!"

1st printing, New English Library, Bob Martin cover art

Newman's pulp hysteria is calmed by sensible on/off gal-pal and fellow scientist Susan Wylie, as she notes this disease, is trapped inside the cages with the bats, surely nothing bad will happen, there's no way it can escape, they can wait till the creatures die off, be cremated, and Newman will admit to his superiors that his experiment was a failure. How big of him! Then Susan and he argue over their romantic entanglement after he breaks their date for that night; then Newman and his boss Haynes argue, all the while, many of the enraged bats are dying in agony beside them. Its eyes seemed to meet his, and they glittered accusingly, with sheer malevolence. Blaming Man, as though in its last seconds it understood.

I'm sure you can see where this is going...

1985 reprint, NEL, Terry Oakes cover art

Newman has broken his date with Susan to hook up with Fiona at a local pub, and of course Susan sees them together. Next morning at the lab, before Susan arrives, he notices the death rate of the bats has slowed and the creatures still alive seem more agitated than ever. Newman again ponders what he hath wrought: 

Whereas earlier he had been repulsed, he now experience a morbid fascination almost to the point of being hypnotized. He had crated something, death in a form that had not hitherto existed. It was all his doing... This was different, exciting. Death could occur at any second.

Well, dear reader, here comes the part we've been waiting for. Susan arrives and is cool and dismissive towards him—how dare she! It's back to professional relationship only. Newman's masculinity is so shattered by this he of course cries "You bitch!" and cracks her in the face. Enraged, Susan attacks him, and Newman falls against the glass bat cage and breaks it wide open... and the last living disease-bearing animals have their escape at last. Wow, can you say toxic masculinity?

1987 reprint, NEL, cover artists unknown

Smith now embarks on the time-honored tradition of vignettes of bat swarms attacking hapless British (specifically Birmingham) citizens in farms, banks, churches, wherever. Now, as noted, the bats are spreading a gruesome disease that causes agonizing pain, insanity, and paralysis; they are not blood-suckers out looking for a treat. Authorities are called in, Newman wants to accept responsibility—there's a novel idea!—as the bats wreak their havoc. The media have a field day and call out Newman by name, putting his life at risk. Vigilantes patrol the streets as thousands die from contagion. Cities burn, armored tanks fire upon citizens who try to gather in protest of the stay-at-home directive. Petty politicians rise up with conspiracy theories. What will it take to stop the bat epidemic? It's all a little unsettling to read these days!

I was impressed with Smith's steady narrative and solid, no-nonsense prose as he depicts his tale of apocalypse. His dialogue is generally poor; that's where you can tell he's not too concerned with realism. But his scenes of attacks are effectively creepy, his depictions of nature overrun with maddened bats chill, and his ability to draw a picture of the workaday lives of various characters is solid. Are there lapses in taste and sensibilities, seen from the vantage point of nearly half a century? Sure, but that's Seventies pulp horror. Smith seems committed to his tale, and that is truly all I ask from my paperback horror fiction. While not reaching the hallowed heights of The Rats or The Nest, these Bats Out of Hell should definitely find a home on your bookshelves.

Once an infected bat touched you, that was it. Finis.
There was no antidote.
Nothing on God's earth could save you.

The Wells of Hell by Graham Masterton (1979): Rock Lobster!

Whenever I find myself picking up and then tossing aside paperback horror novel after paperback horror novel, dismayed and distressed at the author's inability to hook me to the narrative even in the first few pages; whenever it pains my soul that it's been months since I've read a good book; whenever I begin to despair of the genre I love and almost desire to leave it all behind—I know it is high time to get myself back to my trusty old authorial standbys. And Graham Masterton, thanks be to him, is one of those standbys.

For some time I've been hearing chatter, whether on Facebook or Instagram, Twitter or Reddit, about Masterton's 1979* novel The Wells of Hell, which I believe was his 12th (yep, a dozen novels since his 1975 debut!). Don't know how long I've owned a beat-up copy of the 1982 Tor/Pinnacle edition, which you see at the top there, lackluster cover art by artist unknown, and to be honest I never really gave it much thought till, as I said, hearing chatter about it. Good chatter. (After more than a dozen years running this blog, I've developed a second sense about that kind of thing).

After glumly returning for the fourth or fifth or hundredth time some or other books back to my shelves unread that had failed to impress, that chatter got louder in my head and I plucked Wells from my Masterton collection. Won't say I had high hopes, but I knew I was in good hands—probably. 

Aaand—I was! In good hands! Masterton's sure, sarcastic, first-person narration drew me into his tale in an instant, welcoming me back to the fold. Mason Perkins, our narrator, is a humble horror hero, once a college fella studying psychiatry but who dropped out to make a go at something more useful but no less essential when getting to the cause of a problem: plumbing! 

When we meet, Mason is driving along a rural road on a cold Connecticut afternoon with his cat, Shelley (named for the poet, a hint of his school days), to visit the Bodines. A young couple in a cozy country home, Jimmy and Alison hope Mason, reliable plumber extraordinaire, can determine why their well-water is coming out of the faucets an unappetizing yellow-greenish color (or "colour," as the British text in this American paperback has it) and smelling kinda fishy. 

After some foreshadowing conversation—a missing local child, Jimmy's recent dreams of drowning—Mason takes a sample of the water to his pal Dan Kirk, a scientist working at the town Health Department. There Mason makes cute talk with Dan's assistant, the "provocative" Rheta Warren. Mason delivers the corniest of come-on lines to Rheta—"Is this really a job for a girl like you?"—while Dan looks at the water sample under a microscope. No surprise: swirling through the liquid are tiny seahorse-shaped micro-organisms complete with twisted horns and crusty bodies, excreting a urine-looking substance. Disgusting!

 Tor Horror reprint, 1989. Charles Lang cover art

Things take a turn for the worst when, after Dan and Mason go out for dinner and drinks (Rheta has a date with a football player whom Mason mocks like a teenager) and return to the lab to find an unsettling sight: a single mouse, from the crevices of the lab's breakroom, afflicted by a crustacean/insectoid shell and claws on its rear half. They realize it must have drunk from the Bodines' water sample. Mason immediately tries to call the couple to tell them of this alarming development and warn them off the water, but to no avail. The two men make the trek to the Bodines' home, finding it dark, silent, and empty inside, yet dripping with water, as if the house had been submerged in the tide. In an upstairs bedroom, they find the incredible: the body of the Bodines' young son Oliver, impossibly drowned... and in the bath, the chitinous carapace of some kind of enormous insect, crab, or lobster. Disgusting!

Sphere UK, 1988.
Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.

And, of course, from here more Masterton mayhem. In his classic style of breezy, no-rest-for-the-wicked narrative, he invokes Native mythologies and cosmic Lovecraftian lore as our cast of characters rush to solve the mystery of lobster-shelled locals and flooding waters, missing children and the meaning of "Pontapo's curse." Where are Jimmy and Alison? What lies in the deep crevices beneath the earth of New Milford? What caused the unaccountable drownings of the 1770s? Why is it happening again? Who is Ottauquechee? And last but not least: what the hell is in that well?! I won't spoil it for you, but as one of those creepy monstrosities says:

"I am everything and everyone. I am the servant of the god of times gone by and times yet to be. My name is everything and my face is everyone. I am preparing for the resurrection of the greatest of those who lived beyond the stars... The day will soon be here when the great god will rise out of the wells which have been his sleeping-place for so long, and when all men will bow down before him and offer themselves happily as sacrifice..."

Sphere UK, 1981. Terry Oakes cover art

Freaking awesome. There's a headlong sprint to the well-done, eerie subterranean climax, with Shelley (pun intended, one presumes) the cat playing an important role, which should please many readers. Despite his tongue-in-cheek approach, Mason comports himself well for being a simple plumber, bravely facing off with a nightmare nearly beyond comprehension. Wells of Hell may not be the most suspenseful horror novel you'll ever read, as its plot construction is by-the-numbers, and characters even talk about how real life is suddenly feeling a lot like Invasion of the Crab Monsters from the 1950s. But why quibble? This is all good familiar horrific fun.

Masterton has never wasted too much time on the rational understanding of events; his heroes tend to dive in the deep-end with pulp conviction. Nor does he bother making anyone speak American English, they all sound like proper (and not so proper) Britons, but that's part of the Masterton charm. As with his other books, many of which I've enjoyed, there's an almost first-draft vibe; I felt the very ending could've done with another polish. Oh well. Masterton and his Wells of Hell got me out of a summer-long reading slump, I can recommend it to lovers of vintage horror without a second thought, and I can't ask for much more than that!

*The copyright is dated as 1979, but I cannot ascertain which edition was published that year; there is conflicting info online. I know, I know: something wrong on the internet?!

Unholy Mourning by David Lippincott (1982): Ain't It Time We Say Goodbye

Oh that smirk on the face of blow-dried '80s-'do dude, it's the worst. He's even lifting an eyebrow like burying you alive is just some kind of joke. Folks in the know might be reminded of a classic Vault of Horror cover, or even a vintage punk record. Alas, in David Lippincott's wholly unremarkable Unholy Mourning (Dell Books, Nov 1982), only a few moments achieve this kind of horror goodness. A dorky mortician with the disturbing name of Jorbie Tenniel is besieged by a homicidal "Voice" which tells him to bury various townspeople alive to avenge the death of his twin brother. Or something. It's been over a week since I finished reading this and it took me around three weeks to trudge through all 366 pages, so forgive me if I'm a little iffy on the nitty-gritty.

 Lippincott (1924 - 1984)

To begin with, I couldn't even with the name "Jorbie." Oh god it's just the worst, a mish-mash of consonants in the diminutive (I know I'm risking a Joey Jo-Jo moment here). His brother, dead by Jorbie's own sociopathic indifference as the tale begins, has the far more normal name of Kenneth. Like many horror novel siblings, They neither needed nor wanted other children; they lived in a private world of their own. No surprise that Jorbie particularly resented intruders into this world. They didn't always listen to him or do what he commanded the way Kenneth did. A-ha! The prologue was promising, I'll give it that, when Kenneth drowns in Lake Michigan due to Jorbie's daring him to swim too far. Later Jorbie finds Kenneth's water-logged rotting corpse when it washes into some rocks he visits on the shore. It's a life-changing moment: There was no wonderful, happy life after you died at all. You just rotted and fell apart... He would never trust anyone again.

You can see Unholy Mourning gets off to a halfway decent start. Now it's present day, we're introduced to 20-something Angie Psalter, who's cut from the Talia Shire-as-Adrian cloth. A young lay teacher at a parochial school, she lives with her drunkard dad who, we learn a few chapters later, attempted to rape one of Angie's little schoolfriends years before during Angie's birthday party (everyone knows and is cool with that, though, Lippincott points out. And not ironically. Too bad for that little friend, oh well, these things happen). Angie spies Jorbie at a dinner/dance she's working at the school, and thinks he's kinda swell, despite being an outsider as he's a mortician (does that really make one an outsider? Lippincott implies yes). Jorbie had had a promisingly brilliant but short-lived stint in medical school, which he left and went back to the family mortuary business after his father's death. Of course these two lonely misfits start courting, I guess is the term.

Corgi Books UK, 1981

This courtship is nonsensical and abusive. Not even borderline abusive. Of course I'm looking at this 1982 novel through today's lenses, but that only means that victim/abuser relationships have never changed. Her relationship with Jorbie is practically a checklist of abuse: when he goes into one of his brooding moods, gets caught in a pathetic lie, or even brandishes a chair at Angie, she always tries to figure out what she said or did to set him off. He even gives her a black eye! It happens over and over, a tiresome refrain. Twice more a bewildered and hurt Angie tried to apologize for doing something she wasn't even sure she had done.

Repeatedly Lippincott makes awkward authorial observations out of nowhere that Angie would have been better off if she'd just gotten away from Jorbie as fast as possible, but Angie is so put-upon she believes it's all her fault and promises to do better "next time." At one part early in their affair, Jorbie shows Angie his crematorium and other work areas, and he's left out dead bodies of people she knows for her to see, "Oops, I forgot you knew her!" and makes horrible dumb jokes—posing a dead Jewish man so he's making a Nazi salute—while she mildly rebukes him. Mildly. Angie, DTMFA!

Corgi Books UK, 1983

Lippincott makes no attempt to evoke sympathy for any character. Angie is a dishrag/doormat, while Jorbie is the worst kind of arrogant person even discounting his penchant for burying people alive. He verbally abuses his assistant, Pasteur (a pathetic lumbering giant on loan from horror cheapie central casting). The police chief, Hardy Remarque, is okay I guess, but standard cop stuff in stories like this, two steps behind what's really going on (personally I'm rarely into cops in my horror fiction). Some religious characters, nuns and priests, yawn, to help people through their grief after Jorbie's through with his victims. Jorbie's crippled father Caleb is interesting, sad, hiding family secrets, that kind of guy. The only truly likable character, Edith Pardee, a sweet thoughtful older woman, is around only to tell the dysfunctional lovebirds how they truly belong together and the whole town—it's always "the whole town" in these books—thinks the two belong together. It's utterly depressing.

Turns out, Jorbie is going after people who were at the lake the day his brother drowned, they or their now-grown children, injecting them with curare, which he'd stolen from his old school lab, with a tiny hypodermic needle he has specially made hidden in a ring on his finger. It knocks out people's nervous systems, so they can't move or feel, like living death—suspended animation. Yep. The person gets ill, then "dies," basically, and Jorbie pretends to embalm them but he doesn't: he puts them in a coffin and they're buried that way. Then they wake up, six feet under. Shivery indeed... but Lippincott's handling of this gruesome endeavor pretty much saps the scenario of real horror. In the hands of a committed writer, the experience of waking up in a buried coffin is about as ripe as it gets for full-blown fear and madness. The stepback cover artist for the UK edition, Terry Oakes, got it right:

This dud is an excellent example of how the popularity of horror was considered a cash-in for publishers and writers who knew nothing about the genre and cared even less. Lippincott's style is square, dull, obvious, and belabored. Can't imagine what his other mainstream thrillers are like. Horror content was needed and writers were needed to provide it no matter what. I imagined him hunched over his typewriter with a publishing agent behind him, Lippincott looking back over his shoulder and saying "Is this what you want? Horror? Am I doing it right? Horror is scary and violent, right? Huh, right? Booooo!"

I grinded through pages of blocky conversations, banal insights, psycho first-person ramblings, turgid plot mechanisms, and general unpleasantness that offered not a whisper of the weird or eerie. There's an autopsy scene on one of those poor folks, that kinda works, I'll give the author that, but his central idea of revenge and the manner in which Jorbie goes about it—which anyone should be able to guess, as there is nothing supernatural going on in the novel—is unbelievable, even for a horror novel.

Dell Books, 1984

The climax is rendered with professional precision, sure, and its horribleness is notable, but it is all cliche and tired trope and predictable jump scare, with a denouement you know is coming. "This is horror, right? Is this how you do it? It is, right? Boo, argh, aaah!" I wish there'd be a scene of the exhumation of Jorbie's helpless victims: god, I can scarcely imagine! Nope, this is not how it's done. At all. Dedicated reader of horror do yourself a favor: buy a copy of the book for its cover, maybe, but be sure to avoid actually reading it.

Am I finished with this review? Is this it? Okay, good, I can't wait to get back to the actual good horror novel I'm reading now...

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.