Michael McDowell · 1981 · survival

Southern Gothic horror by the man who later wrote Beetlejuice, and the novel Stephen King had in mind when he called McDowell the finest writer of paperback originals in America. Two Alabama families go down to their summer houses on the Gulf after a funeral - and the third house on the beach, the one going under a sand dune, is not empty.

1. 1
   New York

   Luker McCray and his thirteen-year-old daughter India come south for a funeral - a New Yorker and a city child arriving in a part of Alabama that runs on family, heat and things nobody says out loud.

2. 2
   Mobile

   Marian Savage's funeral, and the incident McDowell opens with - a family ritual performed on the corpse in the church that the reader is given no explanation for and does not need one to find appalling.

3. 3
   Beldame

   A remote almost-island on the Alabama Gulf coast where three Victorian houses stand on the beach - two lived in by the Savages and McCrays each summer, and the light and the heat working as characters in their own right.

4. 4
   The third house

   Uninhabited, and going under a dune of blinding white sand that has been swallowing it for years - and not empty, which is what has frightened Dauphin Savage and Luker McCray since they were boys.

5. 5
   Mobile

   What is left of the two families comes back off the sand - and McDowell, who said he wrote books to be in the shop next month rather than for the ages, produced one still argued to be the best after Hill House.