“Katie contains some of my most gruesome murders. It is without doubt my cruelest book. It was a lot of fun to write. » In this epilogue to Katiepublished in 1982, before his saga Blackwater (1 million copies sold in France alone), Michael McDowell, who died in 1999, describes all the paradoxical enjoyment there is in writing and reading horrors.
This guilty pleasure confessed by the man who was also the screenwriter of Beetlejuice and of The strange Christmas of Mr. Jackby Tim Burton, is not brand new: from the first half of the 19the century, in the Anglo-Saxon world, a literary genre is devoted to it, the dreadful penny (“penny terror”). These serials printed on low-end paper and sold on a large scale, targeting the working class and travelers on the first railway lines, offer their readers stories inspired by real news events. Bloody attacks, infanticides, rapes, kidnappings: everything that makes the headlines is presented in juicy stories.
READ ALSO Discover the first pages of the cult saga “Blackwater”
It is from this heritage that the American writer Michael McDowell drew for several of the books making up his prolific work, recently brought out of oblivion by the publishing house Monsieur Toussaint Louverture. In 2022, the publisher published the saga for the first time in French Blackwatera gothic tale deployed in the form of a serial in 1983. The story of this […] Read more
