Notebooks | Gin in the tummies of poodles

Kev Lambert, Medici Prize for May our joy remaintakes an intimate look at literary works, taking a step back to better capture their essence.

This summer, through a combination of circumstances as incredible as it was improbable, a book came into my hands. A small, thick red book with an enchanting cover, imbued with gentle magic – and a kind of poison. The very first pages, swallowed quickly, introduced me to a little girl named Katie who murders a poodle with one punch. She divines, the next moment, through an access of clairvoyance, the sudden death of her mother, burned alive.

Immediately, a question formed in my head: who could have written such a sordid story? And above all: why did its author seem so… endearing to me? I knew nothing about “Michael McDowell,” the name on the cover – not even knowing when he might have written.

Katie and his plots unfolded before my eyes in the heart of July, feeding my curiosity for their orchestrator. I gorged myself on filthy stories, misfortunes, premonitions and buried corpses, always asking myself: who could have imagined such things? I tried to imagine a diabolical Charles Dickens emulator, sharing Julian Fellowes’ fascination with social class (Downton Abbey), the taste for the macabre of Edgar Allan Poe and the biting humor of Heather O’Neill.

I was a little, I think, in love.

Katie is a book pulpdirty, who manipulates us with sadistic joy. Built like a thriller, it uses all the apparatus of the serial novel without any embarrassment, arousing our primary emotions – terror, adoration, rage.

In each chapter, we swoon as we read the trajectory of young Philomela, who tries to escape her inevitable destiny, commanded by a malicious chess player in a game that is lost in advance. To so skillfully strike the keyboard of our sensitive reactions, Michael McDowell sews his story of the best twists and turns, the most obscene murders, the least expected twists and turns, the cruelest plots, shattered hearts and merciless hunts. When Philomela unconsciously moves towards serious danger, I found myself shouting: “Don’t do that! Don’t go there! ! »

The protagonist is not Katie, but Philomela Drax, this poor young woman from New Jersey. We are in the middle of the 19th^e century, his village is dominated by a factory offering poverty wages. Philo and his seamstress mother dress the owners of the factory. But recently, orders have slowed down. The Drax are short of money. The solution to their woes appears when they receive an unexpected letter. Miracle ! A sick grandfather finds them and announces that he has a fortune. The only downside: the family supposed to care for him has bad intentions. We must act quickly, the old man is in danger. His mischievous servants, he explains, have a daughter who “has the devil in her” and whose name is… Katie. The poodle killer!

This first series of adventures reflects the McDowell “way”. The author likes traps and multiplies situations of pure dramatic irony. Each time, the consequences of bad luck are more staggering than our worst imaginary scenarios.

“ Katie contains some of my most gruesome murders. It is without doubt my cruelest book. It was a lot of fun to write,” McDowell says in the epilogue, no doubt with a smile.

I crossed Katie like one devours a TV series full of plots, letting me manipulate them wonderfully. In this famous first chapter, the infamous Katie injects gin into the stomachs of puppies to prevent them from growing (her clients, rich women, prefer small dogs). The scene is a metaphor for the role that the author reserves for readers: we must, like these poor poodles, swallow everything without complaining, under penalty of being thrown out of the window. I drank the gin like a good docile poodle. And I was rewarded a thousand times over, taking great pleasure in rolling around in the most beautiful dresses in the world. Gilded Age New Yorker.

One question remained, however. This enigma of the identity of the author. Who was orchestrating the scheme? Where could this mixture of perversion, historical erudition, social criticism and morbid fascination come from? And why did he touch me so much?

Michael McDowell was born in Alabama in 1950. He wrote numerous novels, including the “Blackwater” saga (published by Alto). He was close to Tim Burton and Stephen King, created the universe of Beetlejuice and collaborated on the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. He was passionate about the most morbid and immoral aspects of popular culture: the ten-cent detective novel, the yellow newspapers and the B horror series. All his life, he collected artifacts linked to funeral rituals: daguerreotypes of corpses, models posing for catalogs of funeral dresses and music composed for funerals. He was in a relationship with a theater teacher. He died of AIDS in 1999.

I discovered, after an enchanted reading, a missing friend, whose existence I did not know. And strangely, McDowell’s obsession with death and horror – less well known than diva worship, but just as queer – explained it all. His fascination with what organizes, classifies and hierarchizes beings too. I was thinking of Clive Barker, Mariana Enriquez, Daphne Du Maurier, Marlon and Henry James. To Anthony Perkins. Is it because they have experienced the exclusion in their flesh that they have gone through part of their lives as ghosts that horrific themes resonate so strongly among so many queer artists? Doesn’t their vengeful pleasure in observing the disasters of heterosexual social mechanics (marriage, inheritance, disgrace!) come from the fact that they are so often excluded from it?

We touch on the mystery, the unspeakable of shared sensitivity. I felt it on every page of Katiethis inexplicable communion, this understanding which passes through the guts and through the heart. And which sometimes ends with a murder that makes you burst out laughing.

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Katie

Michael McDowell

Mr. Toussaint Louverture

455 pages