“If I had a hammer, I would bang during the day, I would bang at night, I would put all my heart into it,” sang Claude François in the 1960s. Katie Slape could have sung the same tune a century earlier. But instead of “building a farm, a barn and a fence”, Michael McDowell’s character would burst skulls, faces. And lives. By putting all his heart into it.
“ Katie contains some of my most gruesome murders. It is without doubt my cruelest book. It was a lot of fun to write,” the American novelist once said. We believe it.
Died in 1999 at the age of 49, the man who participated in the writing of the scripts for Beetlejuice and of Nightmare Before Christmas was recently discovered by French-speaking readers thanks to the Monsieur Toussaint Louverture editions in France and Alto here. First there was, in 2022, the epic fresco in six volumes Blackwater and, last year, taking it The golden needles.
Without repeating himself, the novelist mixes the macabre and the supernatural in varying doses with historical intrigues. In Katie, he adds humor and, above all, the dizzying momentum specific to the soap opera. The novel is, in this sense, Machiavellian: the term “ page turner » is not enough to describe the speed at which we want (need?) to turn the pages. Without skipping any. Okay, maybe a few lines here and there that are particularly explicit about the effects of wielding the aforementioned hammer.
In 1871, in a town in New Jersey, young Philomena Drax (survived) lived with her mother. The latter, a seamstress, draws the needle. Which doesn’t stop them from also pulling the devil by the tail. Until they receive a letter from the grandfather of the first, father of the second. He is rich. He is dying. If they save him from the clutches of the family of crooks, the Slapes, who have taken up residence with him, the loot is theirs. Philo goes for it. But the grandfather died shortly after, the victim of a particularly sadistic murder. Katie can kill with something other than a hammer…
Equipped with a father as stupid as he is rapacious and a Machiavellian stepmother, the foul-mouthed young girl is a fiery-haired monster worthy of hell where she will one day end up (we hope). And she always achieves her goals because she has the gift of clairvoyance. She sets her eyes on someone and she knows everything about him. This makes her an almost impossible adversary to outwit, which poor Philo will have to contend with. That naivety will lead to making blunder after blunder.
Misfortune indeed falls on him repeatedly. Preferably at the end of a chapter. There are a lot of them, they are very short. The temptation is strong to move on. The rhythm is serial. The characters and situations too. We are less here in historical and psychological precision than in The golden needlesbut what pleasure (not even guilty) in this Victorian trip!