The Elementals by Michael McDowell
The McCray and Savage families are looking forward to a peaceful and enjoyable summer at Beldame, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where three Victorian homes tower above the shimmering shore, following a weird and upsetting incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage. The third house is slowly and strangely buried behind a massive dune of blindingly white sand, while only two of the houses are livable. The third house is not vacant, despite being unoccupied for a while. Something dreadful is waiting inside. Since they were young boys, Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray have been terrorized by something that still gives them nightmares. Something dreadful that may have caused a number of awful and unexplainable deaths years ago and is now prepared to kill once again.
The Elementals by Michael McDowell
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There are customs in many families. Some of them are comprehensible and frequently known to others. The Savage family in Mobile, Alabama, is another option, though. The Savage family has a fascinating tradition: “Everyone born into the Savage family received a knife gifted to him at his christening, and that knife went with him for the rest of his life.”
They organize fundraisers for organizations and political campaigns.
When he passed away, the knife remained lodged in his chest and was later buried with him in the coffin. The Savages also take images of all of their dead before they are buried, “ever since they started taking pictures…
The Savage and McCray families depart for a summer vacation to Beldame, more than fifty miles from Mobile and close to the Gulf of Mexico, following Marian Savage’s burial. The majority of the tale takes place in Beldame, where the Savage family constructed three Victorian homes in 1875. Two of them are livable. One is frequently referred to as “the third house,” but is actually not because drifting sand from the dunes has piled up around the building and nearly sealed off most of the entranceways to the home, which still has all of its original if now rotting furnishings. Thirteen-year-old India McCray is the first member of the two families to notice something is amiss—and document it on camera—in quite some time. She is fascinated by the run-down “third house” and does her best to peep inside and take images of the residence.
When describing the events in Beldame that affected the Savage and McCray families, McDowell adopts a fairly informal tone. In most cases, McDowell has the family members enjoy their time as any two Southern families might at a beach resort. There is the occasional strange but insignificant event, and there are some ancestral stories spoken that are out of the ordinary. When they are not in the city, his characters start to speak with more Southern accents.
Axel Young, Nathan Aldine, Preston Macadam, and Mike McCray were only a few of the pen identities used by immensely successful novelist Michael McDowell, who also had success as a Hollywood screenwriter. McDowell is described as “a master of location” and “The Elementals is an indisputably southern work… in direct line of literary descent of the best of the southern gothic heritage, much alone the lineage of the very best horror fiction” in The Elementals.
