Blackwater: The Complete Saga

£13.495
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Blackwater: The Complete Saga

Blackwater: The Complete Saga

RRP: £26.99
Price: £13.495
£13.495 FREE Shipping

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Description

The key takeaway of the plot is knowing it’s a generational novel spanning decades and witnessing the Caskey family.

This is when Elinor Dammert appears — a mysterious young woman who just happens to be sitting in the upper floor of the flooded Osceola Hotel in downtown Perdido when Oscar Caskey and his loyal Negro employee Bray row by. Books 1-3 and 4-6 of the Blackwater series were collected as two omnibus editions released in 1983 immediately after the original serialized publication. Marie-Love is a widow, James is married but his wife is usually drunk out of her mind and living in Nashville. For this book, I savored every page and the closer I got to the ending, the more I dreaded it was about to be over for I would no longer know the Caskey family from Perdido, Alabama. Alabama native Matt Godfrey brings the story alive and does all voices so well you know exactly who is speaking.He understood the political ramification with some nuance, and the prose I found to be efficient, enchanting and beautiful. Characters on paper shouldn’t be likable, or lovable because of the immoral sins certain characters conduct yet you get entranced and manage to love them. His first horror novel, The Amulet, relates the tragedies that befall various individuals who come in possession of a supernatural pendant in a small town.

Like how the Gormenghast trilogy is a fantasy series despite containing no magical elements, Blackwater is in the same vein as a horror book.These characters get to be Southern "eccentrics," just as many queer Southerners before them hiding in plain sight. It will be a 3-star read for me, mostly because I think it’s unlikely I will revisit it in the future, but I see why is it as beloved as it is. One thing that I can give McDowell entirely is that he is amazing at building dysfunctional family relationships.

This saddened me because this book and "The Elementals" are brilliant works and the book community lost so much.

Stretching from Elinor's first appearance, in 1919, to her death in 1970, the Caskey Family Saga would be entertaining and immersive for its characters and family drama alone. Being from Alabama himself, the authenticity of the family's bearing and standing in their community of Perdido is never in doubt. There are ups and there are lows, but one thing is for sure, the women of the Caskey clan sure do take care of business. The story centers on Eleanor Caskey, a woman who appeared mysteriously during a catastrophic flood in 1919 and died half a century later during the next flood to destroy Perdido. I know I have a tough hide when it comes to creepy stuff, but I struggled to lose myself in the atmosphere of this book.

Other themes include the role of women, tradition and family and facing the changing world of the 20th century. The author didn't shy away from showing the ugliness of racial clashes (though only tangentially, the family itself is nice to their servants at least), rape and even addressed different kinds of sexuality (considering the time this was written in and the family he apparently grew up with himself, that is remarkable). Don't get me wrong, I loved these characters back when I first read the books a few years ago; but with Matt's voice attached to them, they became larger than life. One of his final projects, upon which he was working at the time of his death, was a sequel to Beetlejuice.

Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. Vermillion (1980): The murder of a luckless young hustler brings the attention of a bigoted politician to Boston's tight-knit gay community. From the onset, the Blackwater series was right up my alley: southern family saga, and for a bit of fun, throw a swamp monster into the mix. This is not an action-heavy horror, though it certainly has its moments and enough monsters and ghosts to qualify as a horror without question. Tabitha King was asked to complete McDowell's unfinished novel Candles Burning, which was published in 2006 to good reviews.



  • Fruugo ID: 258392218-563234582
  • EAN: 764486781913
  • Sold by: Fruugo

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