in English and American Literature from Brandeis. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in 1978 he was awarded his Ph.D.

Michael McDowell was born Jin Enterprise, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until 1968. McDowell’s first novel, the grisly and darkly comic The Amulet (1979), is also available from Valancourt Books. This edition of McDowell’s masterpiece of terror features a new introduction by award-winning horror author Michael Rowe. Though best known for his screenplays for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, McDowell is now being rediscovered as one of the best modern horror writers and a master of Southern Gothic literature. Ī haunted house story unlike any other, Michael McDowell’s The Elementals (1981) was one of the finest novels to come out of the horror publishing explosion of the 1970s and ’80s. Something horrific that may be responsible for several terrible and unexplained deaths years earlier - and is now ready to kill again. Something that has terrified Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys and which still haunts their nightmares. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach.

The elementals book michael mcdowell