The Elementals

This is more about feel, atmosphere, and characters than pure horror. However, when the horror comes, it's definitely effective and refreshingly weird. Overall I give it 3.5 stars, rounded up.

My favorite part was the perfect evocation of lazy summer days at a beach house, coupled with the sinister background fact that they're terribly isolated and literally cut off from civilization and help much of the time. This is definitely THE horror novel to save for a beach vacation (if you think you'll be able to sleep after sitting in the sand reading it)!

The other really cool element was the Weirdness. The house being swallowed by a dune, the unexplained rituals Odessa does, and India's photos of the house are all deliciously creepy and unsettling. I have no objection to crumbling Gothic manors in England as the setting for horror stories, but one set on the Alabama shore among the summer houses of a filthy rich family is pleasantly novel. And the sun, sand, and heat do not detract one iota from the horror - they add to it.

One thing that did detract slightly for me - this is a slow build. There is a macabre event in the very beginning, but then most of the book is about the characters, the family, and how they interact. It's well past the halfway point that we get to the serious scares. But the writing about the family is good, and it was still interesting even if it wasn't directly tied to horror.

I also disliked the depiction of Odessa as the quintessential Magical Black Woman. She's an essential character in a way, but she's mostly a plot device rather than a person. Even how she's referred to underlines that she's a bit less of a person than the other (white) characters. She's consistently referred to as “the black woman,” rather than “Odessa” or simply “the woman” or “she” - there are 39 instances of the phrase in the book and it was both grating and disrespectful. Luckily Odessa has one funny, lampshading line near the end where she asks why all the family keep looking to her for answers when she doesn't know more than they do, beyond some intuitions.

On the flip side of social progress and cultural awareness - I really enjoyed the portrayal of Luker. He's clearly gay, but the text only gestures at the fact. The book depicts the necessary secrecy and invisibility of homosexuality that prevailed in the 1980s by recreating it in the prose. So we hear that Luker is happily divorced, that he vacations on Fire Island, and that he spends some time in town visiting a man who has “shared interests.” One sees McDowell (who had been in a committed relationship with a man for over a decade at the date of publication) putting some of himself in the story, with a sympathetic portrait of a gay man as a fully fleshed out, three-dimensional character. It's nice.

Overall, this is an excellent entry in Southern Gothic literature. Even with some flaws, I recommend it to anyone who wants some Southern family weirdness capped off with effective supernatural weirdness.