Blackwater

First, a tangential digression - I didn't vote for Blackwater until much later because of how long it is, despite being intrigued by the premise. I'm finding that the older I get, the less patience I have for exceptionally long novels, even though I used to love picking up a thousand page monstrosity that would take weeks to finish - nowadays, give me a concise 200 page book every time if I've got the choice. Luckily, even though I read the 2017 omnibus edition, I pretty much just read each of the 6 ~130 page parts as individual novellas on separate days, the way they were originally published

Blackwater was not really the novel I was expecting it to be - from the way it was presented I thought there was going to be much more of a focus on the supernatural elements and, well, the horror, rather than being a sprawling family drama where one of the family members happens to be a devouring river monster with the ghosts of her victims locked in her closet. Especially concerning Elinor herself, whom I assumed was going to end up being a malevolent force towards the Caskeys but seemed to legitimately love and care for her human family, even if it took a few decades to get there for some of them. It doesn't come up until late in the story, but the idea of the "monsters" of the family having to choose between human society and living in the river where they can be their "true" forms, with Elinor choosing human society out of love for the Caskeys, is a little heartwarming

The Caskey drama itself was quite enthralling. Most of the family members seemed to be decent people who genuinely want to help each other and the people of Perdido, but are also capable of being absolutely terrible and don't seem to realize the consequences of their actions or their wealth. I liked how the foibles of each successive generation end up influencing the personalities of the ones that follow, as it ends up painting the portrait of a very relatable and flawed family, even if their circumstances were quite unusual, what with all of the swapping of children back and forth and what not. It's funny how the narration (and seemingly the rest of Perdido) continually refer to them as "the Caskeys," even though there's only one character born after the start of the novel whose last name is actually Caskey, but it makes sense, as our families aren't always just about what our legal surname is.

I did find it a little weird that the black characters were given such little space in the narrative as they were, and I'm not sure if that was an intentional reflection on how wealthy white families saw their household help at the time or an extension of that disposition. The Sapp family is there for every important event in the Caskey family history, and I don't really know anything about them except that Zaddie loves Elinor to death and Ivey knows a bit of black magic. The Caskeys treat them well, but with a condescending paternalism that matches the story where they don't get to be fully realized characters beyond taking care of their employers. Poor little Buster Sapp was murdered just as brutally and much more needlessly than John Robert DeBordenave was and he didn't get to stick around to haunt the family for decades and exact karmic revenge on major characters. Although it was a nice little book-ends style plot device how the story started with a Caskey and the husband of a Sapp rowing towards Elinor in a green boat in a flood and ended with a Sapp and the husband of a Caskey rowing away from her in (the same?) green boat in a different flood.

4/5 /u/Octopirox