The Amulet By Michael McDowell

The Amulet
By Michael McDowell
1979 Avon
Paperback, 340 pages

                It was high time that I delved into the work of Michael McDowell (1950-1999). Of course, I know Tim Burton’s film Beetlejuice (1988) for which McDowell wrote the story and screenplay, and Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas for which he adapted the screenplay, but I hadn’t read his books. I’m glad that I finally got around to it because this one, his debut novel, is great.

 

                Pine Cone, Alabama in the mid-Sixties is a slow moving, quiet town with a rigid class system and segregation. It’s only source of work is a munitions factory. Sarah Howell works there. Her husband Dean is drafted but is sent back home after a tragic accident with a gun made at that very factory. He is a bandage-wrapped vegetable who is kept company by his mother Jo, a loathsome bitch if there ever was one. This makes Sarah’s dull life even more miserable as she has to keep house for the three of them after a full day at the factory. Then, Jo gives an amulet to one of Dean’s visiting friends to give to his wife. Thus starts the horror.

 

                The amulet passes through a lot of hands in Pine Cone, from poor to rich, from white to black, from guilty to innocent. Everyone who has it in their possession dies in a violent and hideous manner. (My guess is that the Final Destination creators might have read this book.) You get houses burnings, ceiling fan decaps, a woman eaten by pigs, scalpings, suicides, babies in washing machines and all sundry of beautiful gore and grue. Sarah tries to figure out if the amulet is the cause and drags her friend Becca on her investigation, but nobody believes her preposterous story.

 

                Man, this book really made me turn the pages. Short chapters, thorough (but never boring) descriptions and authentic characters really put me into southern Alabama in the Sixties. Of course, still being segregated, the black population is “colored” but the characters are treated no different than the whites. There is some fat-shaming (Jo’s wickedness has a lot more with her nasty disposition than her weight) but overall, this is Sarah’s story and she is someone with whom I really felt in touch. Of course, most characters are there for the kill and you should know by now how much I love they get the old “set ‘em up, knock ‘em down” treatment. We get a huge body count in this one! And that cover by Don Ivan Punchatz is amazing!

 

                McDowell was a gifted writer and  this is the first time for me that a book has dialog with a Southern dialect that isn’t impossible to understand. No easy feat. Having just ended a job working for a jeweler for over 35 years, this might have been a “right place at the right time” read but I thought it was excellent and am already filling my TBR pile with more of McDowall’s books.