← All books
The Elementals
by Michael McDowell
Buy on Amazon
On a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid air. The McCrays and Savages, two fine Mobile families allied by marriage, have been coming to Beldame for years. This summer, with a terrible funeral behind them and a messy divorce coming up, even Luker McCray and little India down from New York are looking forward to being alone at Beldame. But they won't be alone. For something there, something they don't like to think about, is thinking about them...and about all the ways to make them die.
Recommended by
"This book’s haunted house is a holiday home on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. It’s less thunderstorms and flickering lights (although there are some of those) and more sweltering heat and ominous piles of sand. “Horror is the perfect playground to work through all sorts of political, social, and personal ‘issues.’ It’s a breeding ground for metaphor” Following the death of the matriarch, and a rather bizarre funeral, the Savage and McCray families take some time to visit their summer homes. The homes sit on either side of a vacant house buried in sand. Of course, the house isn’t entirely vacant, and the youngest family member can’t help herself from awakening the forces within… There’s something so compelling about the combined high drama of social expectations and traditional horror imagery. I love these very ‘proper’ characters. These are polite people, wealthy people, they organise fundraisers for charities and political campaigns. Bad things aren’t supposed to happen to them. It’s entertaining to see how these people who are so ill-prepared for anything out-of-the-ordinary will adapt, and what they will reveal about their true characters."