Blackwater (Book I: The Flood)

"Blackwater is one of my favourite modern iterations of Southern Gothic fiction. When we were talking about doing this, I knew I had to include a Southern Gothic. The obvious go-tos are Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, but I wanted to include something a little less well-known. Blackwater is currently published as one big novel, but really it’s a series of six novellas which tell the story of a family in Perdido, Alabama, situated against the Blackwater River. It’s a generational story; we see this family evolve over decades. The conceit is that in the early part of the 20th century, during a time when the river floods its banks and Perdido is partially submerged, two people rescue someone that they think is a woman trapped on the top floor of a building. In reality, she is a river monster – she can assume human form, but she’s a carnivorous, aquatic predator. They take her back to safety. Eventually, she marries into the family, and they have children. Those children have children, and in time, she becomes a kind of matriarch of this family. This wide-ranging story is about many things. It’s about Southern life. It’s about the role of women in Southern society. It’s about power dynamics in a family. In a subdued way, it’s about the way queer characters live in this society, and the balance of acceptance and stealth existing between themselves and the people of Perdido. Michael McDowell himself was a gay writer, so he handles this element with delicacy and nuance. The one area I think the novel fails is on the question of race; it’s simply not seriously addressed, though there are certainly Black characters in the story. He missed a trick here because the novel is set during a time when it would have provided a potent subject. Finally, it’s about a monster in the family who is masquerading as a human, and how sometimes she just has to change back into being a river monster and eat some people. It’s such a beautiful story. I think it was John Langan who described it as Eudora Welty crossed with H.P. Lovecraft, and I can’t think of a better description. I love the story so much I wrote an introduction to the edition published by Valancourt Books. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in the Gothic. One thing that makes it distinct is, of course, the set of physical trappings. Instead of old monasteries or churches – the traditional European set dress of Gothic fiction – you have great old oak trees covered in Spanish moss and the weird liminal zones of swamps; you still have abandoned buildings, but they tend to be old plantation houses or empty farmhouses or simply old, weathered shacks; and you have the great sin, which is slavery. That’s the ultimate repression, both in the actual, physical sense, and later in the way the memory is denied or diminished. The lingering wounds of the Civil War play a role; the Confederate South fought to its own eventual destruction. And then, of course, there’s Jesus. Flannery O’Connor called it “the Christ-haunted South,” and the struggle of fundamentalist Christian belief against a generally secular, progressive society is a huge breeding ground for Gothic expression. Each novella is a jump in time, and it’s by this method that he’s able to take us through the generations. Each also contains its own story, its own microcosm of the larger story. In the first installment, called The Flood , Eleanor – the river monster – is rescued while in her human guise, and she is cared for and eventually married into the Caskey family. The next installment tells another discrete tale in the longer arc of the family’s story. Take The House , the third novella in the series. In this one, as you might guess, they’re building a house. By this time in the narrative, Eleanor has become the matriarchal figure, and her son has married another woman. Eleanor and her husband have grown rich through the timber business, so they’re somewhat well-to-do, and the house is for their son and his new wife. But it becomes the locus of a power play between Eleanor and the young wife-to-be; she builds them this house, but doesn’t let them move into it. Complicating the struggle is the discovery that the house – a brand new house, mind you – is haunted. (Interestingly, the ghost doesn’t play much of a role later on in the story, and some people think of that as a fault, but I think that’s misunderstanding it. When you live in a setting that is full of river monsters and all the trappings of the Southern Gothic, then you have to accept that ghosts are a natural part of that ecosystem. They require no more explanation than an alligator does.) This drama is concluded by the end of the novella, and we move on to something else in the following one. In this way, I think, McDowell is able to keep the narrative focus tight and claustrophobic, while moving the story along a span of many years. I did not have a plan at the beginning. The first novella was just going to be its own thing. But about halfway through it, we jump into the head of another character for a chapter – we leave Veronica, the protagonist, and assume the perspective of a character called Charlie Duchamp for a while. And I had such a good time writing Charlie. I wanted more of him. Crypt of the Moon Spider takes place on the moon in the 1920s. A man named Dr. Cull runs an asylum there, and Veronica Brink, the protagonist, is committed there by her husband. In writing her perspective, that was the totality of the world I was dealing with. By jumping into Charlie’s head, I suddenly had to illuminate other parts of the setting. Once I did that, it was like opening the windows of a house and discovering that the peculiarities of this setting implied a hell of a lot about the greater world around it. That’s what really broke it open for me. I knew that I wanted to explore each of the three principal characters in their own semi-contained narrative (you can see the influence of Blackwater here). From that, the deeper themes began to reveal themselves: perspective, self-perception, memory. As for planning it out beyond that, to any granular level – not at all. I’m very much a find-my-way-as-I-go sort of writer. I imagine myself as the guy with a candlestick in a dark place, feeling my way along. By the time I get to the other side, I have an idea of the shape of the room, but before then, I don’t know. I think the phrase ‘lunar gothic’ was the spark. I don’t remember how it came about, but I was immediately in love with the pairing of those two words. I had just finished writing a novel that takes place on Mars called The Strange , and although it’s not a Gothic novel, nor is it really a horror novel, it stemmed from the romantic feeling I felt as a kid whenever I stared up at the moon. Especially in the early twilight, when it’s a chalky little smudge at first, and then when the light goes down, it becomes incandescent. It still feels so potent and magical to me to look at it. And the same thing was true for Mars: I remember my dad pointing out this little pink star and telling me what it was, and it seemed impossible that I was looking at Mars. Mars was a land of adventure, a land of dreams, like Narnia or Oz. It wasn’t a place of science, it was a place of imagination; both of those bodies have always been that for me. Setting a mad house on the moon might seem a little bit on the nose – obviously, the moon is tied with madness in fiction, and Gothic fiction especially – but Gothic fiction is often not particularly subtle, especially in its earliest expressions, so I was happy to go ahead and be over the top. When I write these kinds of stories, I don’t worry about how absurd they are on their face. I don’t worry about the fact that there are trees on the moon, or that there’s oxygen to breathe, or that for some reason this one guy is able to set up an asylum there when there’s no way that could ever be remotely logistically plausible. Who cares about any of that? It’s the primacy of the idea that matters. I ignore real-world logic altogether, and once I shut that door, I can let the dream logic work itself out. The idea was like something growing, like a fruiting tree. Once you decide to give imagination full rein and not worry about explanation, you’ve unchained something, and it’s enormously exciting how the subconscious rewards you for that. My instinct is to trust my subconscious utterly. I’ve never regretted it. So, Cathedral of the Drowned is a bigger book than Crypt of the Moon Spider . Crypt was a little over 20,000 words, and Cathedral is 30,000, so it’s half as big again. We do go back to the moon; we spend some time at the Barrowfield Home, the lunar asylum, and we see what’s become of it. But we spend a lot more time on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons, which in this universe is a jungle moon full of screeching saurian creatures and bubbling volcanoes and a cathedral spaceship that has crashed on a beach. We follow two narratives: Charlie Duchamp, who is a side character in Crypt , and Goodnight Maggie, who is a small-time crime boss in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1920s. It gets kind of weird from there; it’s hard to describe without getting into spoilers. We deal with their strange relationship, partly employee-employer, partly mother-son, partly romantic. They’re a very confused couple."