The arrival of a new woman, a teacher, is an exhilarating occurance in a town where, ”the most exciting thing to do in Perdido is sit on the bank of the river and count the dead possums floating by!” Acclaimed horror writer's 'Death Collection' goes on display". Daily News. October 31, 2013 . Retrieved June 14, 2015.

Does anyone else remember that great romp of a soap opera, Dark Shadows from the 60s and early 70s? Elinor loves her family, she does very well by them, and you really want to like her, except that the some of the acts she commits are less justifiable than others. Going into detail would be spoilery, but let's just say that while some of her victims deserve it, others very much do not... and the consequences of those acts will haunt her family (literally) for generations, until Elinor herself is reclaimed by the waters of the Perdido. This is Southern Gothic smoothly written with style and we follow the rise and deterioration of family and fortune.Where were you coming from? asked Annie Bell Driver. One of the children, a colored one, had awakened inside the church and now peered sleepily out the front door. Written from a third-person point of view, the story focuses on Elinore and the Caskey family. This view allows readers to experience the depth of each person’s social and familial dynamics in the story. The window into each character’s mindset enables the reader to understand the thoughts and actions, including the presumed antagonist. Every character is unique to themselves. As events unfold, readers may sympathize with certain members of the Caskey family, while others may relate to the emotional turmoil caused by a prominent figure. Hendrix, Grady (August 1, 2014). "Summer of Sleaze: Michael McDowell's The Amulet". Tor.com . Retrieved August 28, 2018. Unfortunately, Elinor’s existence is not welcome by everyone. Mary-Love Caskey, the mother of Oscar and the family matriarch, is not enamored. Her feelings of ill will toward Elinor are only partly explained by her irrational motherly fear of Elinor taking her son away. His screen credits include Beetlejuice (1987), and collaborations on The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Thinner (1996). McDowell also wrote the novelization of the film Clue in 1985. The film was based on the board game and featured three different endings; however, the novelization was based on the shooting script and includes an additional fourth ending that was cut from the film. He also contributed screenplays to a number of television horror anthologies, including Tales from the Darkside.

a b Morgan, Chris (May 17, 2014). " Grocer's Gothic". Los Angeles Review of Books . Retrieved June 14, 2015. About the story: It opens after a devastating flood has inundated the town of Perdido, Alabama. No one has completely escaped the fury, not even the wealthy Caskey family. During the aftermath, a woman, Elinor Dammert, is found stranded in a hotel room and is taken in by the family. Hush! cried Oscar, annoyed by Bray’s rudeness, and wondering at it, too. Are you all right? he repeated. What did you do when the water was high? When the town builds The Levee, it proves a vain attempt to control a horrific power that can never be contained… Oscar Caskey sighed. Elinor Dammert was, in some obscure manner, laughing at him. He reflected that she would fit in well in Perdido, if indeed his uncle did find her a job at the school. In Perdido all the women made fun of all the men. Those Yankee drummers coming in and staying at the Osceola talked to the men who ran the mills, and shopped in the stores where the men of Perdido stood behind the counters, and had their hair cut—by a man—while they talked to the men who loafed about the barbershop all morning and afternoon long, but they never once suspected that it was really the women who ran Perdido. Oscar wondered if that were the case in other towns of Alabama. It might, he thought suddenly and terribly, be true everywhere. But men, when they got together, never talked about their powerlessness, nor was it written about in the paper, nor did senators make speeches about it on the floor of Congress—and yet, as he walked beside her through the damp pine forest, Oscar Caskey suspected that if Elinor Dammert was representative of the women of other places (for she must have come from somewhere), then it was likely that men were powerless in towns other than Perdido as well.

Numbered Edition

I've always loved that show, even though I wasn't exactly around when it originally aired. Every episode had deliciously cheesy dialogue and I think the series had some great storylines, with the best of course being Barnabas's first shows. Oscar leaned forward in the boat, grasping the concrete casement of the window with both hands. He peered through the dirty panes.

The book opens after the Perdido River has flooded the banks and inundated the city of Perdido, Alabama in 1919. The entire town is underwater, and Oscar Caskey and his servant, Bray, are in a boat searching for survivors. They find Elinor in a room of the Osceola Hotel. She claims to have been there for four days, without food or clean water. When Bray enters the room, he discovers that the bed is soaking wet. Where did she sleep? How did she survive four days without food or water? A Southerner himself, McDowell easily inhabits his characters from that particular region, their interior lives and thoughts and hopes and fears. The crisscrossing currents of emotional manipulation between Mary-Love and her daughter-in-law Elinor as the latter subtly begins her ascent to the Caskey throne forms the central conflict in the first half of the series. The two powerful, steel-willed women at war use any weapon at their disposal—particularly children. The second half of the series concerns Elinor’s abdication of power to her eldest daughter.It’s part family history, part horror, though, apart from a few key moments the horror is very low key. I didn’t have anything to drink at all, replied Elinor. She didn’t seem to care that she mystified him. I do feel that the universe is a joke,” McDowell said. “And that we are the butt of that joke. And horror is one of the best ways of saying that, of saying that there are things out there and forces and vibrations that are simply malevolent.” Women are at the crux of McDowell’s Southern Gothic horror story. They are the heart of the family structure, and they are the force for change. They are also at war---with men, sometimes, but mainly with each other. It is this dynamic, fueled by the feminine mystique, that drives the novel. It is bolstered by the presence of a cosmic horror with shades of Lovecraft. The result is magically creepy and wonderful. Nel primo volume, ambientato nel 1919 a Perdido, in Alabama, l’autore inizia a tracciare il profilo dei personaggi principali: dalla matriarca Mary-Love, al figlio Oscar, alla figlia Sister. Con la piena, in apertura del romanzo, appare Elinor, una figura misteriosa.