Customer Reviews

The Amulet

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"The Amulet", first published in 1979, was Michael McDowell's first paperback original. It set the pace for what was to be a marvelous career, including several other novels, such as "Cold Moon Over Babylon", "The Elementals", "Katie", "Gilded Needles" and the successful serial novel "Blackwater", to which Stephen King gives credit as his main inspiration for the "Green Mile" series.

Also, as a footnote, Michael McDowell was the creator of the screenplay and characters of the hugely successful "Beetlejuice" movie.

Set in the summer of 1965, at the dawn of the Vietnam war, this is the haunting story of a sleepy southern town called Pine Cone, and what went on there... After her husband is the casualty of a bizarre accident, young Sarah Howell slowly comes to realize that her strange, treacherous mother-in-law, is somehow behind an infernal plan of revenge.

Slowly, as a pendant in a gold chain passes from hand to hand, citizens of the town begin to die in horrid, violent ways. What is behind this? What leads a loving mother to set her children and home on fire? A dutiful policeman to turn against his wife? A friend against the other?... as the body count rises, Sarah must run against time to stop the accursed amulet... but slowly it seems to be finding her way to her.

Michael McDowell passed away on December 27, 1999. He was a lecturer at Tufts college, a Harvard Graduate and a Brandeis Ph.D... He will be sorely missed on account of his books, wickedly funny, consistently written and beautifully plotted. His characters stay with the reader even long after finishing the book. It's too bad he has been overlooked by many a horror and literature fan, for this si the real stuff... Horror as Modern Literature.

I have looked for this book for years. I read the book the Amulet when I was 13 years old so the memory of it is in bits and pieces but it has stuck with me forever. I am eager to read it again and as soon as I receive it I gaurentee I will read it over and over again.
My daughter loves Stephen King but I told her when she reads this it will really make her think.
Please reasure people that it is a book that will stay with you for a long time, and once you begin to read it, you won't be able to put it down. It is full of suspense.

PLOT: After her soldier husband Dean is disfigured in a terrible rifle range accident, Sarah Howell finds her dreary life made even worse -- she works in a dull assembly line job all day, and endures long evenings at home with her vegetable-like husband and his vindictive mother. Her mother-in-law blames the entire town for her son's accident, and her gift of an unusual piece of jewelry to the wife of a man she particularly feels responsible for Dean's troubles starts a chain of gruesome and senseless deaths in the small Alabama town. Slowly Sarah begins to see a connection between all the unusual deaths and the amulet and enlists the aid of her neighbor Becca to track down and destroy it.

REVIEW: The first McDowell book I read was Cold Moon Over Babylon, and I enjoyed it a lot. It took a lot to find a copy, too. None of his books seems to have been reprinted and most are expensive or hoarded. I was surprised when I got a hold of The Amulet through paperbackswap.com, and enjoyed it as well. The deaths do get a bit too bizarre, but his writing is so fluid and interesting that it's a minor point. What I really liked is that the story was linear -- where one chapter ended the next began -- no side trips to other characters or parallel plot lines. And the heroine acted pretty sensibly -- she told people her suspicions and got some help, rather than keep it all to herself like to many annoying fictional characters in dangerous situations.

McDowell's body of work (no pun) is woefully sparse, but I think The Elementals is his best work. He also wrote unter the name Nathan Aldyne, putting out a series of mystery books with a gay bartender and a straight real estate agent as his detectives.

This was McDowell's first novel, and from the second chapter detailing the southern town of Pine Cone you know you are in the hands of a master. In just a few pages McDowell detailed the town so well I swore I could smell the dusty streets.

Basically, as other reviewers have pointed out, the novel is a failed screenplay and written for cinematic effect. No matter. The story is tight and compelling, ending on a grisly note.

McDowell continued to improve with each suceeding novel, with COLD MOON OVER BABYLON as possibly his best work. Little more than a seven or eight
page comic book story, the book grabs you by the throat and you can't put it down. McDowell proved his mastery of literature by achieving a feat I've only encountered once, and that was Stephan Crane's MAGGIE, A GIRL OF THE STREETS. In Crane's story Maggie, at the conclusion, travels through space and time on her journey to the nighted river. It is an amazing piece of writing.

McDowell duplicated it in COLD MOON, having the villan also travel through space and time while driving. I've read the novel at least five times and still don't understand how he did it. But after reading the book I became a raving fan, as did my wife. Each new novel which appeared we bought two copies of so we could each immediately sit down and read it.

Unfortunately, Hollywood finally discovered him and he turned to screenplays mainly with a novel here and there, including a few S-Fs and one series, but no more supernatural titles. His was a true talent, just
one of his works containing more suspense and horror than all the works of a less talented hack like Dean Koontz or Stephan King.

Anyone who appreciates a straight forware tale of horror should seek out his novels.

Cut him some slack on this one: He was young and needed to be published.

This book is an expanded screenplay (unproduced) treatment. It is structured around a series of murders--murders cinematically creative and, at times, implausible (can someone really be decapitated by a ceiling fan? No, of course not)--with a protagonist as one-dimensional as any B-movie heroine. There is not much suspense here. The murders would be tedious were it not for the tension of McDowell's prose--but that is not the same as narrative tension.

McDowell's prose is clear, at times beautiful, often humorous. But if you have never read him, don't start here. Try The Elementals, or, better yet, the Blackwater series. He's a fine writer, one who traded greatness for prolificity, but who is nevertheless worth--no, necessary reading if you care about the horror genre.

Reading this book may have had it's terrifying moments but only the last few chapters were worth the entire read.

I loved the book. I read so much about Michael McDowell from other reviews and I figured I'd give him a go, and he sure doesn't disappoint. The Amulet was relatively short only 340 pages, but it read as if it had so much more vastness. The story of a cursed Amulet that makes its way to person to unrelated person and they in turn kill those around them, sounds hokey, but McDowell makes it plausible with great set ups and back grounds of the characters. The story moves along at a great pace never boring and never slow it is just right, almost as if every sentence and chapter were worded with great skill and construction. The chapters were short concise, and to the point, which made reading that much more enjoyable. Why this story was never made into a great film is beyond me, since it was so compelling a story. As one set of people died and the Amulet moved on, I couldn't wait to see what will happen next, and how their method of death will be explained. Michael McDowell has a very good way of detailing the deaths and he really surprises us by not pulling any punches by killing people that many would say was unexpected, but it works. I first heard of this writer, after I read Duma Key by Stephen King. Someone is a review said that Duma Key was similar to a novel by McDowell called The Elementals, but only that much better. I later learned that Stephen King admired McDowell's work. King's Wife Tabitha even finished McDowell's last novel after his untimely death. With that said i figured he must be a good writer. I went out and purchased all of his known novels, I have Cold Moon over Babylon, The Elementals and The Black Water series complete, so I am really eager to get to his next story, I am glad I can keep such a great writer's memory alive.