This book has a few.įinally, a caveat and an amusing note. If you've read a lot of horror fiction, one thing that is often in very sparse supply is new and interesting notions about the experience of horror and the supernatural. If that conversation and the thread of the book that follows it, wasn't there, I'd regard the novel as a pretty good haunted house story but basically nothing special. I'm not going to spoil it, but there is a particular conversation that happens halfway through - it involves two characters looking at some photographs and talking about what they do and don't mean, and you'll know it when you get to it. The second is that it has interesting ideas about horror and the supernatural. And for instance, the explanation of the funeral customs of the Savage family and how they came to be the way they are is one of those sequences that I don't think anyone but McDowell could have written as well. The haunted house story is one of the best I can call to mind. The characters, though in some cases quirky bordering on grotesque, grow on you. The first is fairly straightforward - it works as a story. There are two reasons why I think more people should read it.
It straddles the gap between haunted house story and southern gothic, and to my mind succeeds at both, but you should be aware that if your tolerance for southern people with dysfunctional family dynamics is low, it may not be the book for you. The Elementals, by Michael McDowell, is an horror novel published in 1981 that I think deserves to be much better known.
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