![]() ![]() In THE ELEMENTALS, he immerses us completely in a world familiar-yet-alien, and in doing so he creates one of the best settings in horror fiction. I read Michael McDowell back in my early twenties, and though I enjoyed COLD MOON OVER BABYLON and loved THE AMULET, I suspect I wasn’t seasoned enough yet as a reader to fully grasp what McDowell was doing. I guess I should mention that I love the plays of Tennessee Williams. In one of Williams’s darkest plays-SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER-there are moments that remind me a great deal of McDowell’s simmering novel. ![]() ![]() Hearing McDowell’s Luker talk to his mother Big Barbara reminded me powerfully of Brick’s frustrating conversations with Big Daddy in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. The dialogue, especially, reminds me of Williams. ![]() But some of the most fascinating aspects of Tennessee Williams’s plays are exhibited in this novel: atypical/dysfunctional familial relationships unpleasant truths suppressed or left unspoken horror-through-acquiescence moments of shocking violence manipulative, vicious matriarchs and patriarchs and a seething, suffocating atmosphere (both thermally and emotionally). This statement isn’t completely true, of course Michael McDowell was a fiercely unique author who wrote unlike any other. If Tennessee Williams wrote a supernatural horror novel, it would read like THE ELEMENTALS. ![]()
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