So, we had blistering sunshine in March and April, pouring rain and bitter winds in June, and now … we’ve got Christmas in July.
Well, it’s not strictly true that we’ve got Christmas in July, but as the jacket art is now ready for the three Christmas books I intend to bring out this autumn, I thought this might be an opportune time to give you your first glimpse, and maybe to chat a little about the plans I’ll put into force once this strangest summer of all has ended.
Which reminds me that – even though the virus is still with us, and many holidays have been cancelled, and the weather is pathetic compared to the weather we had in spring – it is still summer. So, in keeping with that, today I’ll also be reviewing and discussing one of the best summertime horror novels I’ve ever read: THE ELEMENTALS by the late, great Michael McDowell.
If you’re only here for the McDowell discussion, then that’s fine, as always. Just shoot on down to the lower end of today’s blog, and you’ll find it in the Thrillers, Chillers section.
Before then, however, if you’ve got a bit of extra time, I’m going to talk a little about …
Scary stuff this Christmas
But winter, and Christmas in particular, has always been a biggie in this regard. If you need proof of that, don’t take my word for it. I mean, I might have written many Christmas ghost and horror stories, but it’s a tradition that goes way back to MR James, Charles Dickens and beyond. So, there is a kind of precedent for it, to say the least.
By the way, I’m not comparing myself to those masters of the short form, but I do like to think I’ve got a decent track record when it comes to this sort of thing. Hence, I thought this year I’d try to package some Christmas specials – some ‘Christmas annuals’, as they used to say in comic parlance – and put them out there in print.
Two of these will not be unfamiliar, though I did feel it was about time they got something of a reboot.
First of all, we have:
IN A DEEP, DARK DECEMBER
Five Festive Chillers
First published in 2013, though some technical hiccups saw it briefly removed from Amazon a couple of years ago, which obliterated the 30-odd approving reviews it had garnered, this is a collection of five Christmas stories and novellas, all supernatural in tone, all horrific in theme.
The table of contents is as follows:
The Christmas Toys
Midnight Service
The Faerie
The Mummers
The Killing Ground
You may wonder why I’m bringing it out again. Well, the truth is that I’m not really. It remains available as an ebook as it always was, but one complaint I received back in the day was that it never existed in print. Well … from this autumn it will do, under the above newly-designed wrap from the original artist, the indefatigable Neil Williams.
Yes, it’s the same stories that appeared electronically, but for the first time ever (in English) it will now be available in paperback too. On top of that, I’m very excited to announce that it will also be coming out in Audible, as narrated by actor, Greg Patmore, who did such a storming job with last year’s autumn release, SEASON OF MIST.
In a similar mood but much newer, the second festive collection I’ll be bringing out towards the end of this year is:
The table of contents is as follows:
The Christmas Toys
Midnight Service
The Faerie
The Mummers
The Killing Ground
You may wonder why I’m bringing it out again. Well, the truth is that I’m not really. It remains available as an ebook as it always was, but one complaint I received back in the day was that it never existed in print. Well … from this autumn it will do, under the above newly-designed wrap from the original artist, the indefatigable Neil Williams.
Yes, it’s the same stories that appeared electronically, but for the first time ever (in English) it will now be available in paperback too. On top of that, I’m very excited to announce that it will also be coming out in Audible, as narrated by actor, Greg Patmore, who did such a storming job with last year’s autumn release, SEASON OF MIST.
In a similar mood but much newer, the second festive collection I’ll be bringing out towards the end of this year is:
THE CHRISTMAS YOU DESERVE
Five Festive Terror Tales
This is another collection of horror stories and novellas set in and around the Christmas season. But these you won’t have seen together in a single collection, electronically or otherwise … until now. Here’s the table of contents:
The Merry Makers
The Unreal
Krampus
The Tenth Lesson
The Stain
This too will be available in print, as an ebook and on Audible (yet again, with Greg Patmore providing the silken tones). As before, enjoy the marvellous cover art created by Neil Williams.
Last of the three, we’re back in familiar territory again, but with a completely new look. This one is:
The Unreal
Krampus
The Tenth Lesson
The Stain
This too will be available in print, as an ebook and on Audible (yet again, with Greg Patmore providing the silken tones). As before, enjoy the marvellous cover art created by Neil Williams.
Last of the three, we’re back in familiar territory again, but with a completely new look. This one is:
SPARROWHAWK
People may recall that this Christmas-themed horror / romantic / Victorian novella first appeared in 2010 from Pendragon Press, and that it was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award in the capacity of Best Novella the following year. In due course though, the print-run ended, and it was available from that point only as an ebook.
Well, the ebook remains and can be acquired as we speak. But this autumn there’ll be a brand new paperback version and again, it will be coming out on Audible (courtesy of Mr Patmore).
For those unaware, the story is set during the bitter winter of 1843, and follows the fortunes of an Afghan War veteran, who, on release from the debtors’ prison is tasked with protecting a mysterious house in Bloomsbury against an unknown enemy, a duty that unleashes a literal smogasbord of Yuletide terrors.
Well, the ebook remains and can be acquired as we speak. But this autumn there’ll be a brand new paperback version and again, it will be coming out on Audible (courtesy of Mr Patmore).
For those unaware, the story is set during the bitter winter of 1843, and follows the fortunes of an Afghan War veteran, who, on release from the debtors’ prison is tasked with protecting a mysterious house in Bloomsbury against an unknown enemy, a duty that unleashes a literal smogasbord of Yuletide terrors.
To round up, I apologise for talking Christmas in early July, but I do like to drop hints about what’s coming in the months ahead. If you continue to watch this space, there’ll be many more details – links, background info etc – posted here as the summer finally wanes and the darker months draw on.
Now okay, I know it’s pretty dark and gloomy outlook at present, but I promise you that this distinctly is not the case in the book I’ve chosen to review this week. Read on if you don’t mind getting sunstroke simply from the written page.
THRILLERS, CHILLERS, SHOCKERS AND KILLERS …
An ongoing series of reviews of dark fiction (crime, thriller, horror and sci-fi) – both old and new – that I have recently read and enjoyed. I’ll endeavour to keep the SPOILERS to a minimum; there will certainly be no given-away denouements or exposed twists-in-the-tail, but by the definition of the word ‘review’, I’m going to be talking about these books in more than just thumbnail detail, extolling the aspects that I particularly enjoyed (I’ll outline the plot first, and follow it with my opinions) … so I guess if you’d rather not know anything at all about these pieces of work in advance of reading them yourself, then these particular posts will not be your thing.
THE ELEMENTALS
by Michael McDowell (1981)
Outline
The Savages and McCrays are a prosperous pair of families. Born into the Deep South elite, Alabama aristocracy from way back, they lack for absolutely nothing.
Head of the Savage household, Dauphin, is a multi-millionaire and still relatively young. He’s known far and wide as a thoroughly nice guy, and is married to former beauty queen, Leigh, ex of the McCrays, which is where the link between the two families comes in. The McCrays, in their turn, live under the shadow of their patriarch, Lawton, a hugely successful businessman who is now standing for Congress, while his son, Luker, who lives in New York, is so well-fixed professionally that, at the drop of a hat, he can afford to take the entire summer off and vacation in the South.
And yet for all this gold-plated privilege, there are deep strains within the two families, equally deep animosities and even deeper divisions.
Lawton McCray, for example, is separated from his wife, Big Barbara, and reviled by Luker, who views him as the worst kind of ruthless capitalist but as a dangerous man too, because in the spirit of the Old South, where he was born, Lawton will stop at nothing, even crime and violence, to get what he wants. Due in no small way to this unhealthy arrangement, Big Barbara is an unreformed alcoholic, which has left her a silly, unthinking woman, who Luker can also barely tolerate, though recognising that there’s no real evil in her, he does his best. All that said, Luker himself has no dealings with his own ex-wife, from whom he is very acrimoniously divorced … to such an extent that his teenage daughter, India, who has lived with him most of her life, has been raised to dread the mere mention of her mother’s name. India, in fact, though a free-spirited, well-educated New York girl, often struggles because of her father’s domestic prejudices, whether they are merited or not, scarcely knowing how to react to her grandparents.
And then there is the infamously bad-tempered Marian Savage, Leigh’s mother-in-law, whom Luker also hates – or perhaps that should be hated, because we open the narrative at Marian’s funeral. Just in case none of what we’ve so far learned is dysfunctional enough, the funeral service, which is very poorly attended, is interrupted halfway through by an age-old Savage tradition, Dauphin opening his mother’s casket and stabbing her in the heart. Apparently, this is now the custom at all Savage funerals on account of a non-too-distant ancestor being unfortunately buried alive.
So far so Southern Gothic, you may think, and yes, we are firmly in that sun-soaked, uber-melodramatic territory. But The Elementals is also a ghost story, and it isn’t long before we arrive at the scene of the haunting.
At the close of the funeral, the two famlies head south to Mobile, on the Gulf Coast, where they are both part-owners of Beldame. This is basically a narrow spit of sand extending far out into the ocean (though often, the high tide renders it an island), the extreme tip of which is occupied by a row of three beautiful Victorian houses. Here, year-round warm weather (gloriously so in summer), blue skies, an even bluer sea, and complete isolation, always provide a relaxing break. The older members of the two families are completely besotted with the place and have been coming here since the 1950s. Even India, who has never been before, doesn’t much care for her relatives and would rather be in New York, is stunned when she first arrives. She can’t believe how lovely it is, even if oddities emerge almost straight away.
Head of the Savage household, Dauphin, is a multi-millionaire and still relatively young. He’s known far and wide as a thoroughly nice guy, and is married to former beauty queen, Leigh, ex of the McCrays, which is where the link between the two families comes in. The McCrays, in their turn, live under the shadow of their patriarch, Lawton, a hugely successful businessman who is now standing for Congress, while his son, Luker, who lives in New York, is so well-fixed professionally that, at the drop of a hat, he can afford to take the entire summer off and vacation in the South.
And yet for all this gold-plated privilege, there are deep strains within the two families, equally deep animosities and even deeper divisions.
Lawton McCray, for example, is separated from his wife, Big Barbara, and reviled by Luker, who views him as the worst kind of ruthless capitalist but as a dangerous man too, because in the spirit of the Old South, where he was born, Lawton will stop at nothing, even crime and violence, to get what he wants. Due in no small way to this unhealthy arrangement, Big Barbara is an unreformed alcoholic, which has left her a silly, unthinking woman, who Luker can also barely tolerate, though recognising that there’s no real evil in her, he does his best. All that said, Luker himself has no dealings with his own ex-wife, from whom he is very acrimoniously divorced … to such an extent that his teenage daughter, India, who has lived with him most of her life, has been raised to dread the mere mention of her mother’s name. India, in fact, though a free-spirited, well-educated New York girl, often struggles because of her father’s domestic prejudices, whether they are merited or not, scarcely knowing how to react to her grandparents.
And then there is the infamously bad-tempered Marian Savage, Leigh’s mother-in-law, whom Luker also hates – or perhaps that should be hated, because we open the narrative at Marian’s funeral. Just in case none of what we’ve so far learned is dysfunctional enough, the funeral service, which is very poorly attended, is interrupted halfway through by an age-old Savage tradition, Dauphin opening his mother’s casket and stabbing her in the heart. Apparently, this is now the custom at all Savage funerals on account of a non-too-distant ancestor being unfortunately buried alive.
So far so Southern Gothic, you may think, and yes, we are firmly in that sun-soaked, uber-melodramatic territory. But The Elementals is also a ghost story, and it isn’t long before we arrive at the scene of the haunting.
At the close of the funeral, the two famlies head south to Mobile, on the Gulf Coast, where they are both part-owners of Beldame. This is basically a narrow spit of sand extending far out into the ocean (though often, the high tide renders it an island), the extreme tip of which is occupied by a row of three beautiful Victorian houses. Here, year-round warm weather (gloriously so in summer), blue skies, an even bluer sea, and complete isolation, always provide a relaxing break. The older members of the two families are completely besotted with the place and have been coming here since the 1950s. Even India, who has never been before, doesn’t much care for her relatives and would rather be in New York, is stunned when she first arrives. She can’t believe how lovely it is, even if oddities emerge almost straight away.
The third house in the row, for example, is owned by neither the Savages nor the McCrays (no one seems to know who owns it) and is succumbing to an immense sand dune, which has built up alongside it and is now slowly engulfing the entire structure.
In due course, this third house will start to cause serious problems, though at first all is well.
It’s unusually hot, even for Southern Alabama, and the two families are just glad to have got away from it all, and now unwind in the taciturn but fastidious care of Odessa, the Savages’ black servant, who’s been with the family since before the Civil Rights Movement but who stays with them because she is treated like a relative, even though she herself doesn’t behave this way.
During this languid time (when the livin’ is very easy!) other quirks of Savage/McCray family life emerge in full keeping with the oddball Southern Gothic tradition. Though Luker is well regarded by his family, he swears and profanes freely in front of them all, including his mother, and thinks nothing of sunbathing naked in the presence of his 13-year-old daughter (a liberal approach to life that she returns in full). But none of this seems out of place here at Beldame, where the sun beats down, the sea laps, the sands continually shift, and time literally seems to stop (the families never follow any kind of itinerary when they’re here, they just let the day and the mood take them).
And yet throughout, there is a clear feeling that, despite the summer lassitude, all is not well. The families love Beldame, but it’s soon evident that they are wary of the place too, particularly the third house, though no one seems to be willing to say why, especially Odessa, even though she – or so India suspects – knows most.
The youngster finally starts to wheedle it out of her elders just what the problem is, learning that the third house has been a blot on this picturesque coastline for quite some time. The reasons for this seem to vary. It’s not exactly an eyesore, but it’s been empty and unclaimed for so long that it’s decaying as well as disappearing into the sand. It seems especially weird though that third house is still fully furnished inside, almost as if someone still lives there. And yet neither the McCrays nor the Savages ever go in to look around.
Most interesting to India, though, are the third property’s ghostly aspects.
There are only one or two stories to this effect, and they have the aura of campfire tales. For example, a bunch of school friends once swore blind that they saw a naked fat woman walking around on the third house’s roof.
When India commences her own investigation of the third property, she immediately detects a presence and later learns that Odessa had a little girl once, Martha Ann, who disappeared here but was presumed drowned, India concludes that the third house is haunted by the child’s ghost. Odessa, finally breaking her silence, simply replies that it isn’t so.
Martha Ann is indeed dead, she says, but what occupies the third house is not her ghost. It is something much, much worse …
Review
Michael McDowell wrote several successful novels, but died at the tragically young age of 49, which on the evidence of The Elementals, was a major loss to genre fiction.
Because, in short, this is a very frightening ghost story.
Not only that, it tips all expectations on their head. Sun, sea, sand. Hardly scary, you may think. Well, you’d be wrong. An affluent southern family: handsome men, gorgeous women, heated passions – all the ingredients of a domestic melodrama rather than a horror story, right?
Wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s a bit of a culture shock when you first start reading The Elementals. Because the one or two minor macabre details aside – Marian Savage’s funeral, Luker’s utter (and never fully explained) hatred for his ex-wife – it does feel as if you’ve strayed into a Tennessee Williams play. But that doesn’t last long. Because Beldame (which in Old English used to mean ‘witch’, of course), is so well-realised a location that it really is a place apart. Its atmosphere is one of strangeness, dreaminess, and yet all the time, right from the outset, the sinister presence of the third house is there, just on the corner of our vision.
All of this feeds nicely into the plot’s slow-burn development. We certainly have a lengthy period when nothing really seems to happen, the family re-acclimatising to Beldame, sunbathing, sleeping, engaging in idle conversation, and yet odd, unnatural things do happen. At first, they are small, and eerie rather than frightening. But they come more and more regularly, the sense of foreboding gradually growing, until finally the occupants of the third house, disturbed from their slumbers by both India’s curiosity and Lawton’s villainous schemes, explode out in some of the most terrifying ways imaginable.
But I think what works best for me in The Elementals is not so much the increasingly scarier story, but the unknowable nature of the antagonists.
I don’t want to say too much about them because I don’t want to spoil things more than I already have. But as you are likely to guess from an early stage, these aren’t ghosts or even demons in the conventional sense. This is something else entirely. Luker McCray only calls them ‘elementals’ because he can’t think of any other way to describe them, but it’s highly appropriate. Because whatever they are, they are part of this place, and always have been.
It certainly makes for a intriguing conflict: the time-honoured, all-powerful southern clan coming up against an infinitely more ancient and immovable force, something intangible and yet sentient, something that is intricately connected to this lonesome spit of land, so much so that it can control the sand, the air and the water, and yet something that can strike at its opponent in any number of ghastly and horrifying ways – and trust me, these are ghastly.
You may have to wait a little while for them, but the moments of horror, when they come, are literally hair-raising.
As I say, apart from the catastrophe of losing Michael McDowell as a person, we also lost a prodigious talent, and what I imagine would have been a plethora of such clever and spine-tingling tales.
If you’ve not read The Elementals, you must do. It was first published in the 1980s, but it’s a timeless chiller in the best way, and I’m not remotely surprised that Poppy Z Brite referred to it as ‘surely one of the most terrifying novels ever written,’, or that Stephen King described McDowell as ‘the finest writer of paperback originals in America,’ while Peter Straub called him ‘one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country’.
And now, here we go again. I’m going to be bold (or stupid) enough to try and nominate my own cast should this very fine horror story ever hit the screen. If only I had the power to make it happen in reality:
India McCray – Lara Decaro
Odessa Red – Viola Davis
Luker McCray – Joe Kinnaman
Lawton McCray – Woody Harrelson
Big Barbara – Rebecca Front
(The picture at the top is not mine, but despite searching online, I couldn't find an owner. If anyone has an issue with me using it without a credit, just let me know and I'll add a credit immediately, or even remove it).
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