By MICHAEL McDOWELL (Avon; 1981)
This is said to have been the late Michael McDowell’s personal favorite of his novels (“When I was writing THE ELEMENTALS, I was working on the first draft between midnight and two o’clock every night…and having to stop because I was so frightened of being alone, having written things that really frightened me”). It’s certainly representative, showcasing McDowell’s facility for atmospheric Southern-fried horror and his obsession with Japanese cinema of the 1960s; WOMAN IN THE DUNES/Suna no onna (1964), with its ever-present sand imagery, is evoked in ways that will become obvious, as are KWAIDAN (1964) and KURONEKO (1968). Southern gothic fiction and Japanese cinema? An odd pairing, certainly, but one that in Michael McDowell’s unique world was quite harmonious.
THE ELEMENTALS’ setup is very John Farris-like, involving the Savages and the McCrays, two uber-wealthy southern families connected by marriage. This clan has its own inscrutable rituals, one of which is detailed in the prologue, describing a funeral for the recently deceased Marian Savage in which her son Dauphin pierces the corpse’s unbeating heart with a ceremonial dagger (for reasons that are too involved, and bizarre, to go into here). Another of those rituals is unveiled a few chapters later, in which the group heads off, as it often does, to a most unique family-owned vacation spot: Beldame, a secluded region of the Alabama shore where, among other suspicious events, Marian breathed her last.
Beldame contains three structures, “large, eccentric, old houses such as appeared in coffee table books on outré American architecture,” in the first two of which the Savages and McCrays reside. The long-abandoned third house is haunted by supernatural presences known as “Elementals” that are apparently made of sand, and whose existence is quite easy to ignore in the languid atmosphere suffusing Beldame. The highly precocious thirteen-year-old India McCray climbs a sand embankment outside the third house and inadvertently breaks a window, which has the effect of not only riling up the Elementals but freeing them from their confines.
Much is made of how the Elementals don’t abide by earthly rules, with irrational motives and actions that are completely incomprehensible to us, yet that’s not always the case. Ghostly revenge was a favorite theme of McDowell (inspired, once again, by the narratives of his Japanese forebears), and is evident here in the comeuppance visited upon the corrupt politician Lawton, a McCray relation who enters the third house with the intention of burning it down, and gets his just deserts at the hands of the Elementals.
Other effective scare passages include a peek by India into an upper window of the third house and a recollection by India’s father Luker involving legless men with mouthfuls of sand. McDowell had a gift for horrific description that was nearly as potent as his sense of place, which is likewise employed to the fullest in THE ELEMENTALS, a novel that’s nothing if not supremely atmospheric in its depiction of life in coastal Alabama (where McDowell was raised).
What this novel also is, unfortunately, is clichéd. Any number of shopworn horror tropes are aired in these pages, such as the black maid, in this case a woman named Odessa Red, who boasts a thorough knowledge of all things supernatural—and so like Richard Hallorann in THE SHINING serves as all-knowing Explainer to the white protagonists and the reader.
Ultimately, though, it’s the imagery conjured by McDowell that makes THE ELEMENTALS the haunting triumph it is. I know I’ll be a long time forgetting those three Victorian houses situated on a dusty spit of land, or a massive sand dune that “did not merely encroach upon the house (but) had actually begun to swallow it,” or that aforementioned glimpse into a window of the seemingly deserted third house, inside which we “see the door to the center hallway being drawn carefully shut.”