Blackwater: The Complete Saga

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A hotel has been evacuated but when the son of a wealthy matron and a black servant drive by the halfway submerged hotel in their little boat, they discover a young woman in one of the rooms. When an enemy from her past unwittingly sets in motion the destruction of her family and livelihood, cunning criminal mastermind Lena Shanks, now with the power and resources to fight back, plots her revenge.

On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido's first family. There are many, many characters who come and go over the course of this intergenerational saga, as the original characters have children who grow up and have children of their own, all of whom are dragged into decades-long family squabbles and secrets, take on the psychological characteristics and burdens of their parents, while developing new ambitions and traits of their own, and making this a rich, deeply Southern soap opera full of powerful, domineering women and the men who more or less play supporting roles in their struggles. I felt like I was immersed in this saga; felt like I was living in the small town of Perdido, and seeing life through the eyes of the Caskeys and the Sapps.Among McDowell's other writings is the six-part serial novel Blackwater, a chronicle of a southern family drawn to the supernatural. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly funny, by a lineup of authors that includes both. Though unaware of each other's existence, a string of gruesome tragedies conspires to reunite the sisters. 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. Y'all, this is a Southern Gothic to drown all other Southern Gothics in a bathtub full of muddy river water.

When Oscar Caskey finds the mysterious Elinor Dammert on the second floor of a hotel during a great flood, he brings her home and falls in love with her. 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.The beginning is probably the best, where mysterious newcomer Elinor takes on Caskey family matriarch Mary-Love. But a third house, abandoned and slowly being consumed by sand, holds a horror that has plagued them for generations, and young India McCray has awakened it. Seriously, in a Southern book, it is okay for the whole book to be read with an accent, I do not understand why this doesn't happen more often.

I would have loved it if this aspect of the story had been explored more deeply, but that thread of the tapestry was snipped off much too soon for my taste. and the consequences of those acts will haunt her family (literally) for generations, until Elinor herself is reclaimed by the waters of the Perdido. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.In the last third of the book the supernatural ramps up and is so well written that I woke one morning from a dream that had taken me into the story and filled me with fear. At first, I was pleased that a novel about wealthy white Southerners actually understood that Black Southerners also exist and are part of the community beyond just cooks and housekeepers. But I didn’t warm up to any of the characters, with the notable exception of Frances (more on her a bit later), and the horror elements were a little too quaint for me.

Although containing explicit horror elements and gruesome descriptions, McDowell manages to deal with interesting and heavy themes!

These characters get to be Southern "eccentrics," just as many queer Southerners before them hiding in plain sight. The small town of Perdido, Alabama is almost entirely flooded after a big storm, and once the rain stops, young Oscar Caskey goes around the town in his little boat to see if anything can be salvaged, or anyone rescued. Few books have been able to do that and, once I had gathered my wits, I loved it was able to effect me like that. This is my second 30+ hour listen of pandemic times and while it takes me a longer time to get through than it normally would, there's a real pleasure in staying in the same world and characters for so long.