“A matriarchal saga. Powerful women who fight for dominance for generations. A unique atmosphere for an addictive read. A realistic portrait with supernatural touches. Masterful and visual writing in an ambitious project between pulp and HBO.”
This is how Blackwater describes the independent publisher Blackie Books, which has this year released in Spanish and Catalan the books by Michael McDowell, with the translation by Carles Andreu and the cover illustrations by Pedro Oyarbide.
Reading Blackwater is truly hypnotic and addictive: an experiment that resurrects the serial novel, a now extinct genre that has become a true literary success in Spain in just three months that rivals any series on television platforms.
McDowell (Enterprise, Alabama, 1950), who died early at the age of 49 due to AIDS, wrote thousands of pages, including collaborations for scripts for Tim Burton films, the series Alfred Hitchcock, presents, and Thinner, a film he adapted Stephen King’s novel Hex. Blackwater, which was first published in 1983, is considered his masterpiece.
The saga had not been published until now in Europe. After the sales and critical success in France and Italy, with more than two million copies sold at the beginning of 2024, the Blackie Books publishing house launched the books from February to April, one every 15 days, until completing the six that make up the series. (The flood, The dam, The house, The war, Fortune and Rain). The idea of ​​publishing it in installments was something demanded by the author himself in a bid to revive the nineteenth-century serial genre.
Blackwater has been classified as a Southern Gothic horror novel, but it is much more. It covers about 50 years of the life of three generations of a family of timber landowners in the first half of the 20th century in the United States.
In a town on the diffuse and wooded border between Florida and Alabama, women call the shots and decide their destiny. They direct the lineage and motivate the course of events. Women in a man’s world, but where the male characters really become mere pretexts for the story to continue.
Perdido, a small southern town, is home to white burghers and merchants and black workers and servants, in neighborhoods separated by the river that bears the same name and which flows into the Blackwater.
The saga immerses the reader in the humid and muggy atmosphere of this isolated town between immense and unexplored forests of ancient pines, swamps infested with alligators and rocking chairs on hot porches, and always without losing sight of the torrential, cold and muddy current.
A numbing everyday life that alternates with the mysterious purposes of mythological beings whose existence, in some way, has always been intuited and tolerated. As the author himself recalls, Southerners tend to naturally accept any unusual behavior that might seem abnormal or eccentric to others.
The novel evokes the nostalgia and magic of One Hundred Years of Solitude and when it seems that everything slows down on hot nights, it suddenly also produces chills as Poltergeist once made an entire generation tremble, and at times it is recreated with humor by purest gore genre.
The author introduced supernatural ingredients typical of magical realism, but also the manners of Jane Austen or the terror of the novels of H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King. Everyone will find references to him.
All the places that appear in the novel have real geographical references: in Alabama and Florida there are both the commune of Perdido and the rivers and cities, swamps, bays, gulfs and beaches in which the experiences of the Caskey family take place: from Pensacola to Mobile or New Orleans, it’s all there. Exploring the real world it recreates on Google Maps is surprising and almost as fascinating as the novels themselves.
McDowell transformed all of these places into imaginary references as well to tell the story of pioneers in the American South who became timber landowners. The life of the Caskeys runs parallel to the history of the country in the 20th century until the 1970s and addresses the rapid and profound socioeconomic changes that led to the extinction of the economy of the rich southern families who made their fortune on the backs of black slaves. .
It also puts on stage other issues of the human condition that are always very topical: ambition, love and filial hatred that hides behind power, feminism and patriarchy, homosexuality, inequalities and prejudices or the degradation of the environment.
The strange confluence of two wild rivers and what their waters hide become the center of the world, where it seems that nothing happens, but in reality everything happens, including the violence and terror of a matriarchy without compassion and where nature always, In the end, he claims what is his.
“Michael McDowell: my friend, my teacher. Fascinating, terrifying, simply brilliant. The best of us all.” Stephen King