The Elementals by Michael McDowell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Heat, Sand, and Southern Gothic Spirit(s) or “What family is as lucky as ours?” Mobile, Alabama circa 1980, summer. The funeral of Marian Savage, who died at about fifty-five, supposedly of cancer. The only attendees are Marian’s daughter Sister Mary-Scott (a nun) and son Dauphin, his wife Leigh, Marian’s best friend Big Barbara McCray (mother of Leigh), her son Luker (Dauphin’s best friend), his thirteen-year-old daughter India (Luker and India live in the Upper West Side of NYC), and the African American Savage family maid of thirty-five years, Odessa. Things take a bizarre turn when Sister Mary-Scott and Dauphin perform a little ritual over their mother’s corpse, ending when Dauphin reluctantly sticks a dagger about two inches into her chest. Thus begins Michael McDowell’s novel The Elementals (1981). After the funeral, while Leigh and Odessa explain the origin of the Savage family dagger ritual, which started 250 years ago when they were the aristocratic Sauvages and governed the territory, India’s hand goes on automatic pilot and draws a detailed replica of a macabre photograph she’s never seen depicting Dauphin’s great-great-grandmother holding her stillborn twin sons. Late that night Dauphin peers into the cage of Marian’s parrot Nails and hears it speak for the first time in its eight years of life: “Savage mothers eat their children!” With the “grotesquely lush” Alabama foliage and hothouse climate, the lurid Savage funeral tradition, and lines like, “Luker, I'm glad you raised me in New York--Alabama’s weird,” McDowell seems to be setting up a straightforward southern gothic horror story. But things get hotter, sandier, and creepier the next day when the funeral attendees relocate south along the Gulf Coast to rural, isolated Beldame (nearest neighbor six miles away), site of three identical Victorian lagoon beach houses, one belonging to the McCrays, one to the Savages and one, the unsettling, abandoned, and avoided “Third House,” belonging to—well, let’s just say that it belongs to a large, steadily encroaching sand dune and some traumatic memories. The ostensible purpose is to vacation at Beldame. The hidden purpose is to get Big Barbara, an alcoholic, on the wagon so as to save her life—and her marriage to her corpulent, red-skinned, white-haired, violently vulgar husband Lawton, a rich fertilizer businessman who’s never lost an election and is now running for US Congress (House of Reps). The plot purpose is to violate every norm of common sense so as to spend time next to an apparently haunted house that traumatized Dauphin, Leigh, and Luker in their youths. Well, Beldame IS a beautiful locale with gorgeous views of the bay and lagoon and porpoises and flying fish and shore birds, “So remote you might well be at the end of the world.” Anyway, soon the characters are hearing someone walking on the floor above them and discovering that it can’t be the person they thought it was; Dauphin is seeing his recently deceased mother; India is photographing the Third House from the outside, seeing something terrifying in the reflection of a bedroom mirror (this being a pre-digital camera era, we must wait for the photographs to be developed to find out what they’ll reveal); the characters are lying around sweat-soaked and heat-drugged, with India, the only true Northerner among the group, lying on her bed with her mouth opening and closing like a dying fish; and Odessa—the no nonsense, modest, and cryptic authority on the supernatural—is doing a little supernatural baking. Meanwhile, Lawton shows up to pressure Dauphin to sell Beldame so oil can be developed offshore and to make Big Barbara fall off the wagon. For a while the prospect of Lawton getting elected and making Dauphin sell Beldame is as horrifying as the Third House and whatever occupant(s) it may have! The characters are absorbing and their conversations often amusing, so when the paranormal starts impinging on their post-funeral “vacation,” the story becomes suspenseful. I like India: direct, spunky, precocious, innocent, and vulnerable. Her frank relationship with her father is interesting: she doesn’t call him “Dad” but Luker; they joke about his drug use; he has no problem letting her drink a little sherry or even a glass of scotch; they both use foul language; they have no problem with Luker’s situational nudity in front of his daughter; they’re life allies who respect and trust each other. There is plenty of dry humor, like “Luker’s opinion of the dead woman was that he had never seen her to better advantage than in her coffin.” Lots of sardonic, teasing conversation among family members: “Luker would be a terrible man to have for a father, if you ask me. He’s the meanest man in the world. You ask anybody.” “Is that why you love him more than you love me?” Along with the scary events and graphic blood etc., there are vivid and creepy descriptions, like “The fields gave out and were replaced by weak-willed stubby forests of diseased pine and scrub oak” set amid white sand dunes, and “the heat that engorged all creation in that lonely place.” If you shake your head to break McDowell’s spell, it all might seem absurd rather than horrifying: insubstantial spirits (“elementals”) unpredictably dominating a house, making victims disappear now and then, and forming sand-puppets to terrorize people with their worst nightmares, without ever revealing what they want or why they do what they do, not to mention the tired horror schtick of people visiting supernatural locations and entering haunted houses when they should know better. Furthermore, according to the rule of horror that the less you know what you’re dealing with, the scarier it is and vice versa, I found the graphic climax to be the least scary part of the novel, devolving into knife and cleaver fights with noseless and eyeless, large-eared and small-toothed elephantine monster babies. Audiobook reader R. C. Bray gives a fine, gravelly, no-nonsense reading of the novel, enhancing the characters and suspense. The Elementals reads like compact Stephen King with a dash of Solaris; the overall message is that we can’t understand some things in the world. If you sit back and roll with it, it’s quite the diverting page turner. View all my reviews
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