Blackwater: The Complete Saga

There’s a scene in the 2000 comedy High Fidelity in which record store owner John Cusask puts on a record by the Beta Band, betting his co-workers that he can sell five copies just by doing that. I wonder if Grady Hendrix had a similar feeling when he talked about Michael McDowell’s epic piece of Southern Gothic Blackwater in his Paperbacks from Hell, because as far as I can tell, that was the largest impetus from the book moving from being a nearly forgotten cult favorite to something far larger, ultimately getting a fresh publication courtesy of Valancourt Books that collected all six volumes of the serial novel into one epic piece of storytelling – and, in doing so, allowed the book to be read by a whole new wave of people who might have otherwise missed it.Now, that being said, it’s not hard to understand why Blackwater was only ever a cult favorite; even if it is great (and it is), the novel defies easy description. More than a thousand pages and spanning more than fifty years, McDowell’s story follows the Caskey family, one of the wealthiest families of small Perdido, Alabama; it opens in the aftermath of a 1919 flood, when eldest son Oscar rescues a stranded woman named Elinor from a flooded hotel and strikes up a relationship. From there, McDowell spins a labyrinthine tale of family politics, of social upheaval and societal change, of family secrets and abusive husbands, of matriarchal power and struggles for self-definition. It’s the tale of Oscar’s mother Mary-Love, the domineering matriarch of the family, and her struggle for power against the interloper Elinor. It’s the story of the family’s children, who often become pawns in the family’s power games, and find themselves traded and given away without any say of their own.Oh, and it’s also a tale about the fact that Elinor isn’t really a woman so much as a carnivorous river monster who feeds on human beings now and then.You might think that the fact that the new arrival of the Caskey family is secretly a nightmarish monster would make Blackwater a true horror novel, but that’s surprisingly not the case. Oh, rest assured, there are horror aspects of Blackwater – every volume of the tale (it was originally published in six short novellas, similar to what Stephen King would later do with The Green Mile) has at least one grisly murder, and there are other uneasy elements of the tale – restless spirits, possible hauntings, and more. But while McDowell undeniably knows his way around a horror scene, and writes some truly eerie moments and some brutal scenes, Blackwater always feels less like an intense tale of horror and more of a rich piece of true Southern Gothic that occasionally lets loose. For all of his capabilities and willingness to go to dark places, McDowell’s focus is on his family and his characters, spinning a family saga that covers four generations and nearly half of a century, all before sticking the landing ably in a well-chosen final scene that pulls it all back together.So let’s talk about these family dynamics, which are undeniably fascinating. Too often, when you hear that horror (or, really, any genre) is writing about the South, what you expect is overblown stereotypes, one-note caricatures, and so forth. But McDowell was born and raised in Alabama, and his sense of the South always feels observed and intelligent. He has an ear for dialect that feels natural and never forced; when his characters speak in accents, it’s never forced or over the top, but instead nicely echoes the real voices that I’ve grown up hearing. And that goes doubly for his sense of how people act in the South. McDowell nails the strange relationship between well-off white families and the African-American families who so often work as their hired help, never reducing it to simple racism or condescension, but finding the very clear affection and love that forms between these families and the way they often become extended relations of each other. (That being said, McDowell definitely doesn’t do as much with the Black families of the book as he does with the Caskeys, and that sometimes feels like a weakness of the story that you can’t help but wonder if he would have written differently had he written this years later than he did.) And he avoids the “backwoods,” “hateful,” “bigoted” stereotypes you so often see in this books, dropping in a male character who’s undeniably gay but is never called out for it, or following two women as they set up a lesbian homestead and find themselves simply accepted. As McDowell writes:"Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things. To have informed the men who hung about the seed and feed stores that two women had bought Gavin Pond and were turning it into the biggest farm in the county would have brought out calls to repeal the voting rights amendment; but when confronted with Grace, the men were perfectly willing to accept her, her cousin Lucille, and Lucille’s little boy."What McDowell creates, in other words, isn’t just a cartoonish view of the South, nor is it some romanticized, idealized version of things. Instead, he writes about it as someone who understands it, and knows so much of how things “work” in small towns and in Southern families. And the Caskeys, for all their oddness, are undeniably a family – but a compelling one nonetheless. This is a matriarchal clan in every way, and McDowell presents that in a way that every male figure of the book simply understands. This isn’t some kind of “women are monsters!” thing – no, the Caskeys work because the women understand what needs to be done, but even within that, there are affectionate women, cruel women, cold women, motherly women – no one is easily pigeonholed or labeled. Indeed, over the four generations of Caskeys we meet, McDowell brings the entire crew to life, to the point where it’s impossible to mistake one for another except for the moments where we see family members re-enacting patterns that they learned from the older generation, illustrating how family can shape us and the world we know.I’m so far into this review, and I feel like there’s so much I have barely touched on here – the way that the book incorporates its horror elements so seamlessly that you don’t even think of the oddness of this family soap opera also having a river monster as part of its story; the way that it finds the humanity in even the cruelest actions of its characters, but never forgets the psychic scar tissue left behind; the ableness with which McDowell can segue between the big picture of Perdido or the country and then instantly shift back into the personal and the intimate; the way he plays with the relationship between the Caskeys and Perdido in subtle ways; the way he nails both casual heartbreak that death can bring but also the way it so often represents a time of transitions for families – there’s so much here to discuss, and so little time. So here’s where I’ll leave it: I’ve never read anything quite like Blackwater in my life – something that so clearly was as invested in its soapy family tale as it was grisly dismemberments or revenge from beyond the grave, something that so much used the Southern Gothic but not in the usual ways, something that loved the pulpy feel of its writing but also focused on the complexity of families and human relationships. It’s a fascinating, oddly hopeful, ambitious, moving, haunting, and compelling read, and one that I’m glad Hendrix and Valancourt have resurrected for a new wave of readers.

This book was incredible. I'm assuming you've read the synopsis, so that I don't have to explain much.This story doesn't necessarily follow one character. You follow the whole Caskey family, and those that marry into it, and you follow the Caskeys through generations. A solid forty-five years at least. You'd think things would be boring or lost along the way; how could you go through forty-five years in 800 pages and not lose anything? But you don't lose anything and its not boring at all. McDowell somehow finds a way to keep you intimately connected to the Caskeys even when months go by in a page or two. The characters are front and center here and they don't disappoint. Some you love to hate like Mary-Love Caskey, some you hate to love, and then still some characters you love to love. You get to watch some characters grow up from birth, some grow old. One of the Caskeys has this unexpected but amazing character arc. Things that they do and say all mean something and have consequences and define the novel hundreds of pages later.His third person narration is one of the best I've read. Like I said, you can span years without feeling that you're missing anything. It's a really nice change of pace to read a story about rich people for once. Seeing how they handled troubles and even the Great Depression was fascinating. The day-to-day things of old school southern life are engrossing to read about as well.Lastly, this is a horror novel. The family drama is much more prominent, but the mysterious, the horrific, the bizarre and the strange and supernatural are all very much here, too. These scenes are atmospheric and engrossing. Sometimes violent. But it's never too much and I honestly don't feel anyone would be put off by that here.I got three other McDowell books because Blackwater was so amazing. Read this!

This was worth reading. It was hard to put down. The ending was not my favorite, but the book held my interest. I will read other books by this author.

I just could not stop reading. And now i feel something is missing in my world. Elinor has just become a companion. Someone to look up to.

Il primo libro non ti prende subito, ma quasi dopo metà.Da lì in poi non ti riesci più a staccare e quando finisci la saga per un pò non sai più cosa leggere, è come ti mancassero i personaggi!

Depuis le temps que j'en entendais parlé, je l'ai finalement acheté et je n'ai pas été déçue! Tout est génial: bien écrit, persos attachants, et le côté fantastique ne m'a pas empêché de dormir ^^ Cette d'abord une grande saga familiale, et je n'ai jamais décroché!

What a book! story follows the fortunes of a wealthy Alabama family from the depression right through to the modern era.The supernatural element of the story and one or two of the main characters is never overplayed. In fact it is rarely mentioned or used in the tale but it is also at the heart of the family.I found the epic nature so wonderfully drawn. As a result of the massive span of years there are a huge variety of characters coming and going, living and dieing. Not one of them felt anything but a meaningful part of the story.Superb!

Highly entertaining Southern Gothic Horror