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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scary southern tale of creepy rivers and specteral revenge,
By
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This review is from: Cold Moon over Babylon (Paperback)
Michael McDowell had a truly great way of creating the creepiest tales in the simplest prose. Amidst all the genteel southern hospitality and bubbling personalities lies a dark undercurrent of murder, and revenge from beyond the grave. Nathan Redfield picked the wrong family to bully when he started in on the Larkins, a quiet and unobtrusive small family trying to eek out a living with a tiny blueberry crop. Nathan is an abusive controller over everyone he meets, especially his brother Ben, but he hides it behind his slick southern veneer of politeness. When he targets the Larkin farm, attempting to take it at whatever cost, he finally meets his match without ever realizing it. McDowell so skillfully takes the reader into this hot, humid, languid town that you actually feel you are there, and that you are part of this small town and know these peoples habits as well as they do. Superbly written and completely creepy, with frequent doses of terror and gore mixed with good ol' southern hospitality, you will find this book one of those "can't put it down" reads that leave you wishing for more.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
McDowell,
This review is from: Cold Moon over Babylon (Paperback)
The last reviewer asked what happen to Michael McDowell.His health betrayed him and after the screenplay for Thinner, he taught screenwriting at Boston University for a year before his body wouldn't allow him to continue even with that. He died recently, in 1999, I believe. He was a good guy and a fine writer.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Effective, if Standard, Horror,
By John Noodles (A Field in ND, USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cold Moon over Babylon (Paperback)
I first read McDowell back in the day, when The Amulet first came out. I was young then, and uneducated, and while I found his books entertaining (I went on to read this book, The Elementals, and the Blackwater series), I didn't appreciate his craftsmanship. I broken my horror teeth on lesser, pulpy writers.
Cold Moon Over Babylon is popular commercial fiction, yes, but it is also very literate, and even literary. McDowell is clearly familiar not just with the tropes of the genre (written and cinematic) but with mythology as well. His prose is precise, varied, dignified. His descriptions are evocative in their careful use of nouns and verbs rather than on hysterically piled-on modifiers. His prose is a pleasure to read in a way that far too many hack writers' is not. [STOP READING AT THE END OF THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ SPOILER MATERIAL.] This narrative follows a pretty standard movie type of plot, and much of the action and images in it would lend themselves particularly to cinematic storytelling. (Horror movies, for instance, would suggest that there is no more comfortable dwelling for a black snake then the mouth of a corpse.) Dispatching the protagonists midway through the novel, while an interesting experiment, took much of the suspense out of the novel for me. Nathan is a murderous swine; we know this well before it's explicitly revealed (and we're meant to). We know, too, that he is going meet his doom one way or another (and he does, in a fairly predictable, B-movie manner). On the way, our loathing of Nathan builds not so much as a result of his murders--standard bad-guy stuff--but because of his smarmy, manipulative treatment of characters we sympathize with. When they are gone, there remains no empathetic character to anchor us in the narrative. McDowell instead tries to propel us with hallucinatory manifestations, and the ghosts' pursuit of Nathan, but these become predictable and tedious. I like McDowell. I recently re-read the Blackwater series; it's entertaining and well-written. Cold Moon is similarly entertaining. It's a shame McDowell died prematurely, and arguably a shame, too, that he didn't concentrate his literary efforts on the horror genre, perfecting it. I suppose that when you churn out books at the rate McDowell did (between '79 and '83 alone he pumped out *fifteen* books!)excellence is impossible. He was talented, disciplined...prolific.
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