Blackwater: The Complete Saga

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The story centers on Eleanor Caskey, a woman who appeared mysteriously during a catastrophic flood in 1919 and died half a century later during the next flood to destroy Perdido.

McDowell wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas if that gives you any idea of his brilliance. That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power.I know I have a tough hide when it comes to creepy stuff, but I struggled to lose myself in the atmosphere of this book. Overall, there is a slight supernatural twist to this that the author isn't really making a mystery about. There is a portion of the book where every member of the family has so much wealth they could never spend it all, and while the town as a whole has prospered to some extent, they just continue to sit there, no idea of what to do with the wealth except get more of it, and that makes me just about lose my damn mind.

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 over time, it became clear that while the Black community in Perdido is a part of the book, it is a nameless, faceless monolith except for the handful of Black servants in the Caskey homes. As Kelly grows closer and closer to death, her hallucinations become more vivid until she is imagining her parents, very old, watching her being pulled from the water in horror.