Scott Rhee's Reviews > The Levee

In “The Levee”, the second book in Michael McDowell’s chilling Southern Gothic horror series Blackwater, the town of Perdido, Alabama has hired on an engineer to build a levee that would hopefully mitigate or prevent the devastating effects of flood similar to the one several years ago, in 1919, which was also the year that Elinor Dammert mysteriously showed up. Everyone in town seems to be for it, except for Elinor, who believes that the river won’t let them build it.

No one knows or suspects that Elinor isn’t quite human. She is a creature linked inextricably to the river, borne from the fetid black water of the Perdido, and the river demands blood sacrifices now and then.

This is a weird series, and I mean that in a good way. McDowell, born and raised in the South, clearly has a kinship with fellow Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner, all of whom had a vivid and existential love-hate relationship with the South.

The best Southern writers all tend to strike a similar chord about the unique nature and, well, personality of the region. The land, the culture, the type of people that choose to live there: all these elements intertwine into a tapestry, which the keenest of regional authors help to weave.

McDowell has done that masterfully in his Blackwater series, capturing the hot sultriness of the Alabama country, the psycho-sexual tensions of a post-Reconstruction era, and the insane family dynamics of a wealthy white Southern legacy family.

Whether one is Southern or not shouldn’t matter when it comes to appreciating this series. When you read McDowell’s words, you are, temporarily, a Southerner.