After the saga Blackwater, Golden needles et Katiethe publishing house Monsieur Toussaint Louverture continues to publish the work of American author Michael McDowell (1950-1999).
Cold moon over Babylonthe author’s first real novel, written in 1980, is thus proposed and allows us to see how the rest of his bibliography was built around similar themes: family, secrets, violence and death. Between the macabre and the sensational, Cold moon over Babylon is an addictive book.
The story takes place in 1980 in the small town of Babylon, Florida. The Larkin family, who lives in the forest – filled with snakes – along the River Styx, survives by harvesting and picking blueberries. Shortly before the season begins, 14-year-old Margaret Larkin is violently murdered.
The rest of the town seizes on the affair and Babylon plunges into an anxiety-inducing paranoia bringing up long-buried secrets.
Pitting the rich and the poor, the living and the dead
Finding his tone from the first pages, Michael McDowell is interested, with Cold moon over Babylonto the human condition as a whole. A story of feelings and emotions, bringing to the surface the best and the worst of humanity, the novel gets to the point and paints the portrait of a family struck by destiny and inevitability in America in the 1980s.
Because this is also the great strength of the title: offering a retrospective look at a complex decade for the country. Evolution of societies and technologies, deep divide between the powerful and the precarious, Cold moon over Babylon is also a book about class struggle. While the richest do everything to increase and maintain their wealth, the poorest try to provide for themselves as best they can. Two worlds collide and only supernatural intervention can right the wrongs and avenge the oppressed.
Michael McDowell regularly uses fantasy to enhance his works and add powerful symbolism. If Cold moon over Babylon is above all a thriller and a thriller, the book slowly but surely turns towards a ghost story – unless this is all just a figment of the imagination of certain characters? The book constantly plays with symbolism – the use of the names “Babylon” or “Styx” are not innocent – and with what it offers, or not, to the reader. The latter quickly learns the truth surrounding the murder of Margaret Larkin. The resolution of the investigation, from the reader’s point of view, is not the heart of the work. While taking the public into his confidence, Micheal McDowell maintains an element of mystery and continually surprises.
Cold moon over Babylon is unpredictable. Actions and revelations lead to dramatic and irremediable consequences, offering the reader a total feeling of loss of control. Everything is possible with the author and everything is possible in these United States plagued by violence and horror.
A Stephen King reference
If Michael McDowell has gained popularity in France since the publishing house Monsieur Toussaint Louverture embarked on a major republication of his work – with careful editions with splendid covers – the author has been a reference in the United States since for many years and has inspired several writers. Among them, Stephen King, who never concealed his admiration for the novelist and notably praised The Amulet et Cold moon over Babylon in an essay published in 1980.
In Cold moon over Babylon Indeed, it is easy to see how Michael McDowell inspired Stephen King. Short chapters, incisive and immediate writing, detailed visual horror, presence of the macabre in a remote town in the United States… The style and themes discussed between Michael McDowell and Stephen King are similar. Cold moon over Babylon is interested in the many inhabitants of the city, follows them and makes connections between their stories. A story which poses a place and a time with all its particularities, and tells part of what the United States is, exacerbating the horror, magnifying the beauty. A process that King would also use in his later books.
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Discover Cold moon over Babylon in 2024 is an exciting exercise. Beyond the intrinsic quality of the novel – between the richness of its characters, the unpredictability of its story and all the calm decorum of the 1980s – the book refers to the beginning of Michael McDowell’s career and confirms the absolute mastery of the author on what was then his first major novel. More than 40 years later, the talent of the writer and screenwriter – he notably created the character of Beetlejuice – is recognized, and Cold moon over Babylon can be appreciated as the beginnings of an assertive style and a deep voice.
A great gothic and macabre novel which questions humanity – and the United States, let’s say it again -, in the best vein of page-turner the most addictive.
Cold moon over Babylonby Micheal McDowell, Monsieur Toussain Louverture, 460 pages, in bookstores since October 4, 2024.
