And after all, what big family does not have a monster as member and a couple of ghosts hidden in some closet.

In Teaching for Transfer: A Guide for Designing Learning With Real-World Application, author Michael McDowell provides a guide that educators can use to improve their teaching, engage their students, and develop their students' transfer abilities. Featuring an insightful new introduction by John Langan, Blackwater traces more than fifty years in the lives of the powerful Caskey family of Perdido, Alabama, under the influence of the mysterious and beautiful—but not quite human—Elinor Dammert.

I was so interested in the family and their closeness that I didn't care too much when horrific things weren't happening. His final, unfinished novel Candles Burning was completed by novelist Tabitha King and published in 2006. From the decline of Southern aristocracy, the nature of wealth (and power), and the impact of the Civil War and reconstruction on Southern society. He was born in Enterprise, Alabama, in 1950 and died of AIDS-related illness in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1999.

McDowell wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas if that gives you any idea of his brilliance. Life after slavery is a tragedy, I had some preconceptions of what life would be like after the Civil War but the most surprising thing, almost nothing changed. Tell us why you liked or disliked the book; using examples and comparisons is a great way to do this.

As a character-driven epic spanning multiple generations, it often feels closer to Harper Lee or William Faulkner than Stephen King. I did the audiobook, and at first I was frustrated that the reader didn't have a Southern accent unless he did dialogue. Going into detail would be spoilery, but let's just say that while some of her victims deserve it, others very much do not. I loved how long it was and how much the family changed over the 50 years and how it never quite fell into a rut. In the mid-1980s, McDowell wrote the "Jack and Susan" mysteries for Ballantine Books, featuring characters reminiscent of the influential Thin Man films.