The Elementals

THE ELEMENTALS

Michael McDowell
was born in
1950
in Enterprise, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until
1968
. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in
1978
he was awarded his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis.

His seventh novel written and first to be sold,
The Amulet
, was published in
1979
and would be followed by over thirty additional volumes of fiction written under his own name or the pseudonyms Nathan Aldyne, Axel Young, Mike McCray, and Preston MacAdam. His notable works include the Southern Gothic horror novel
The Elementals
(
1981
), the serial novel
Blackwater
(
1983
), which was first published in a series of six paperback volumes, and the trilogy of “Jack & Susan” books.

By
1985
McDowell was writing screenplays for television, including episodes for a number of anthology series such as
Tales from the Darkside
,
Amazing Stories
,
Tales from the Crypt
, and
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
. He went on to write the screenplays for Tim Burton’s
Beetlejuice
(
1988
) and
The Nightmare Before Christmas
(
1993
), as well as the script for
Thinner
(
1996
). McDowell died in
1999
from AIDS-related illness. Tabitha King, wife of author Stephen King, completed an unfinished McDowell novel,
Candles Burning
, which was published in
2006
.

Michael Rowe
’s first novel
Enter
,
Night
was a finalist for both the Prix Aurora and the Sunburst Award. His second novel
Wild Fell
, a classic ghost story set in northern Ontario, has drawn comparisons to the work of Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe and is a finalist for the
2013
Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Toronto and is at work on his third novel. Visit him at www.michaelrowe.com.

By Michael McDowell

novels

The Amulet
(
1979
)*

Cold Moon Over Babylon
(
1980
)

Gilded Needles
(
1980
)

The Elementals
(
1981
)*

Katie
(
1982
)

Blackwater
(
1983
;
6
vols.)

Jack & Susan in
1953
(
1985
)

Toplin
(
1985
)

Jack & Susan in
1913
(
1986
)

Clue
(
1986
)

Jack & Susan in
1933
(
1987
)

Candles Burning
(
2006
) (completed by Tabitha King)

pseudonymous novels

Vermilion
(
1980
) (as Nathan Aldyne)

Blood Rubies
(
1982
) (as Axel Young)

Cobalt
(
1982
) (as Nathan Aldyne)

Wicked Stepmother
(
1983
) (as Axel Young)

Slate
(
1984
) (as Nathan Aldyne)

Canary
(
1986
) (as Nathan Aldyne)

screenplays

Beetlejuice
(
1988
)

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
(
1990
)

The Nightmare Before Christmas
(
1993
)

Thinner
(
1996
)

* Available from Valancourt Books

THE ELEMENTALS

MICHAEL McDOWELL

With a new introduction by

MICHAEL ROWE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

The Elementals
by Michael McDowell

First published as a paperback original by Avon Books in
1981

First Valancourt Books edition
2014

Copyright ©
1981
by Michael McDowell

Introduction ©
2014
by Michael Rowe

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

Publisher & Edito
r
:
James D. Jenkins

20
th Century Series Edito
r
: Simon Stern, University of Toronto

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

isbn
978
-
1
-
941147
-
17
-
7

Also available as an electronic book.

Cover art by M.S. Corley

Set in Dante MT
11
/
13
.
2

CONTENTS

Noonday Devils

An Introduction to Michael McDowell’s
The Elementals

Re-reading Michael McDowell’s
The Elementals
again after my first reading of it, more than thirty years ago, what immediately returned to me was the vivid, annihilating heat of the Alabama summer at Beldame, the compound of three Victorian mansions perched on an ocean of glittering white sand on the Alabama shore—mansions that never existed in real life, but which were conjured to life by the writer whose novel you are now holding in your hands.

As someone not unfamiliar with gothic horror fiction, especially ghost stories, I am struck, today as in
1981
, by that sunstruck Gulf shore brightness. Gothic horror fiction traditionally has depended on darkness and cold.
The Elementals
, among other things, a terrifying ghost story in which the ghosts are not exactly ‘ghosts’ in the accepted sense of the word, is notably unbound by that cliché, and its horrors are as likely to reveal themselves under the blazing noonday sun as they are to do so once the sun has gone down. The heat and the light in
The Elementals
is as much of a character in the novel as any member of the Savage or McCray families, as much of a character, indeed, as any of those three terribly-occupied houses at Beldame.

Michael McDowell, once hailed by Stephen King as “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today,” was a master of
place
. Other writers will have their own take on his aesthetic when it comes to
place
, but my (very joyous) task here is to introduce
The Elementals
,
not any of his other novels that comprise one of the finest oeuvres in
20
th century speculative fiction, and one of the books most formative to my aesthetic as a horror writer.

I read
The Elementals
in the late autumn of
1981
. I had just graduated from boarding school and was trying to make a life for myself in Paris. As a Canadian living in Europe, I was already two geographic and cultural steps removed from the languid deep-south world of McDowell’s novel. Though a lifelong fan of horror fiction, in those pre-Internet days I knew nothing about the novel’s author, and had not read any of his other books yet.

What I
did
know was that, reading
The Elementals
in my apartment with the red-and-gold flocked wallpaper, while the cold Paris rain beat against the mottled glass of the apartment’s windows, I felt literally transported to high-ceilinged rooms where the heat baked in from outside, stopping breath, cutting off any hope of relief, while the shifting, living sands filled the rooms, assuming the shapes of the dead with a malign intelligence beyond the ken of the living—the world of Beldame.

And it stayed with me for more than thirty years, retreating into my subconscious, occasionally suggesting itself in dreams, and always feeling like a place I
visited
, not a place I’d merely
read about
. The people I met there—the McCrays and the Savages—became people as real to me as those in my own life. Re-reading the novel in
2014
was more like a reunion of old friends than merely a revisiting of a book I’d read as a very young person on the brink of my own adult life.

Which is, after all, one of the hallmarks of a masterpiece.

What I know now, but didn’t know then, was that I was living through a certain later golden age of paperback horror fiction. There had been other such ages, but the flourishing of horror novels between the late ’
70
s and the late ’
80
s was a time of immeasurable richness. It was a time when it was not only possible, but likely, to pick up a book like
The Elementals
in all its southern gothic glory at the now-inconceivable price of $
2
.
95
. Perhaps the reason I never understood the disdain for horror fiction—literally never even
connected
to it as an abstract concept—is that my sensibility was nourished on work like this. The fact that they were in mass-market paperback didn’t matter, because with work like McDowell’s, which could just as easily have been published in hardcover by Knopf as southern gothic, the reader was in the hands of a gifted novelist. Of course there were hacks working in horror in the early ’
80
s, as in any era, but for anyone with a whit of discernment, there were the Michael McDowells and the Charles L. Grants. The sheer volume of the work being produced at that time, in that format, meant that it was also a moment when a horror reader (or aspiring horror writer) with taste had a treasure-trove through which to sift.

In an interview with critic Douglas E. Winter for his superb interview collection,
Faces of Fear
, McDowell famously quipped, “I would be perfectly willing if a publisher came up to me and said, ‘I need a novel about underwater Nazi cheerleaders and it has to be
309
pages long and I need fourteen chapters and a prologue.’ ”

It’s a terrific line, and certainly apropos for a writer of McDowell’s prodigious output, but the reason the line actually works it that McDowell’s writing never reads like the work of the author of underwater Nazi cheerleader novels.

Among other things, McDowell was a master of
place
,
and
The Elementals
is an unequivocally southern novel. While it’s very true that Michael McDowell (who wrote about many different locales over the course of his career) was never bound by region, and that the success of
The Elementals
derives from his extraordinary gifts as a storyteller, not his extraordinary gifts as a southerner, it might also be true that the confluence of those two identities combined to create something extraordinary in this case.

It opens exquisitely with the funeral of the matriarch of an old Alabama family with its own particular tradition of bizarre burial rites. The matter-of-factness with which these rites are taken for granted by the clan is itself a preemptive cultural assertion. The entire opening sequence—the funeral, the dialogue between the various family members in the wake of the passing, the rite itself, a parrot that screams a jolting, terrifying refrain, “
Savage mothers eat their children up
!
”—is in direct line of literary descent of the best of the southern gothic tradition, let alone the tradition of the very best horror fiction.

In the hands of a lesser writer, that aspect could be culturally distancing to non-southerners, or at least remarkable in a slightly jarring sense, but McDowell’s canvas, with its glorious descriptions and its artless, pitch-perfect dialogue, makes the experience of reading
The Elementals
an embracing one. The reader relaxes back into the prose, and travels.

The Alabama panhandle
,
he writes,
which consists only of Mobile and Baldwin counties
,
is shaped rather like a heavily abscessed tooth. Mobile Bay represents the large element of decay that separates the halves
,
and at their northern extremities the counties are further divided by a complex system of meandering rivers and marsh.