Many families have traditions. Some of them are understandable and often familiar to others. But then there is the Savage family in Mobile, Alabama. Their family tradition is a trifle bit odd: "every person that was born into the Savage family got a knife presented to him at his christening, and that knife went with him for the rest of his life. And then when he died, that knife was stuck in his chest, and then got buried in the coffin with him." The Savages, "ever since they started taking pictures," also take photographs of all of their dead before they are buried. Dauphin Savage has "a whole box of `em." Thus, readers are introduced to the Southern gothic/Addams Family-like Savage and McCray families brought together at a funeral and the eerie world that writer Michael McDowell creates in The Elementals (1981; re-issued by Valancourt Books with an outstanding Introduction by Michael Rowe, 2014) as the latest member of the Savage family, Marian, "the meanest bitch that ever trod the streets of Mobile" is laid to rest with a hole in her heart.
Michael McDowell (June 1, 1950 - December 27, 1999) was a highly successful novelist publishing under his own name as well as under a variety of pen names including Axel Young, Nathan Aldyne, Preston Macadam, and Mike McCray and was a successful Hollywood screenwriter. His most well-known screen work includes Beetlejuice (1988) The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Thinner (1996; based upon the Stephen King novel). Writer Christopher Fowler cites The Elementals as McDowell's "best book" (for an article in The Independent, June 30, 2014). Michael Rowe in his Introduction for the Valancourt re-issue of The Elementals states that McDowell is "a master of place, and The Elementals is an unequivocally southern novel... in direct line of literary descent of the best of the southern gothic tradition, let alone the tradition of the very best horror fiction."
Following Marian Savage's burial, the Savage and McCray families retreat to Beldame, over fifty miles away from Mobile and near the Gulf of Mexico for a summer vacation. It is in Beldame that the majority of the book is set and where there are three Victorian houses built in 1875 by the Savage family. Two are inhabitable. One, often referred to as "the third house," is not because drifting sand from the dunes has piled around the structure and all but sealed most entryways into the house that still contains all of its original, although now rotting, furnishings. Fascinated by the dilapidated "third house" and doing her best to peer into and take pictures of the dwelling, thirteen-year-old India McCray is the first of the two families in quite some time to sense and maybe catch sight of something that is not right... and capture it on film.
McDowell takes a very casual approach to telling his story of the Savage and McCray families' experiences at Beldame. There is an occasional odd but miniscule event, there are some ancestral stories told that are out of the usual, but for the most part McDowell has the family members spend their time as any two Southern families might at a seaside retreat. His characters, away from the city, begin to revert to more of their Southern accents. McDowell's depiction "the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude," and how the various characters react to members of their own and each other's family rings with authenticity. One member of the assemblage who is neither a Savage not a McCray, Odessa, a Black servant, plays a pivotal role in what befalls the families during their stay in Beldame. She has seen more, knows more, and understands more about what plagues the "third house" than anyone. It is Odessa who warns India that members of the family, if they talk about it or not, are afraid of the sealed up abode. She warns: "They's just some houses that got something inside `em--a spirit like. No ghosts, no such thing as dead people coming back. Dead people go to heaven, dead people go to hell. They don't hang around. Nothing like that. They's just something that's maybe inside a house." It is that "something" that obsesses India and which becomes the focus of the novel as it slowly unfolds.
Readers looking for a traditional haunted house thriller may find themselves a bit perplexed with The Elementals. What McDowell serves up is out of the ordinary, more original, and somewhat more ambiguous than a regular ghost story. Perhaps what makes McDowell's novel unique is the fact that it is not an ordinary haunted house story. Odessa is correct about the ghosts, but there is something definitely malicious at Beldame. Under the beautiful rays of sunshine with the gorgeous, appealing ocean nearby there is something very wrong. Something wrong about the elements. Something wrong about nature itself: the wind, the weather, the water, and especially the sand and how all of them behave as if they are being controlled by very unnatural "presences" in the "third house" which have powers not just over the elements but prey upon people and their perceptions and imaginations.
Interestingly, it isn't just the supernatural that threatens the Beldame area. McDowell throws in some old-fashioned human greed into the mix of his story with an oil company lusting after the properties and a McCray running for Congressional office eager to get the Savages to sell the property so the houses can be demolished and the oil company can gain easy access to off-shore oil.
McDowell's story really begins to take off when Odessa's efforts to keep the family safe begin to fail and the presence(s) that dwell within the "third house" begin to inch toward the home occupied by the Savages.
Compared to the much more horrendous chills that McDowell produces in The Amulet (1979; also re-issued by Valancourt Books), The Elementals is rather tame depending upon a creepy atmosphere to hold the reader's attention rather than a lot of shocks until the last seventy pages when McDowell throws his readers into a house of mirrors with numerous images and possibilities of what is in the "third house" that is endeavoring to expand its domain. With bodies of various family members beginning to pile up in mysterious and oftentimes macabre fashion and a truly gruesome act by India that allows her once and for all to see what the terror is at Beldame, McDowell brings his novel to a blistering climax, and readers of The Elementals are unlikely to look at the pure white sand of a beach in quite the same way ever again.
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Popular Highlights in this book
Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference.Highlighted by 203 Kindle readers- India had previously entertained no sympathy for the Southern way of life, with its pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness, its overwhelming lassitude.Highlighted by 200 Kindle readers
- Worry, clever thought, conversation all were crushed by the weight of the atmosphere.Highlighted by 162 Kindle readers
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Reviews with images
Do not buy, defective.
This is misprinted and not worth the MSRP. Totally unacceptable. If you notice the right hand side in the photo I posted... plus some pf the pages are askew.
Top reviews from other countries
Drew Rowsome
The Elementals: camp, comedy, horror and hot and cold-running sweat
Reviewed in Canada on September 23, 2016