The Elementals

The Elementals is a horror novel by the American writer Michael McDowell, published in 1981. It is set on a strip of the Gulf coast near Mobile, Alabama, where three Victorian summer houses were built on a narrow spit of land called Beldame and the sand has been swallowing the place ever since.

Two of those houses still belong to the McCray and Savage families, who have come there for generations. The third has been abandoned to the drifting sand, and the novel makes clear early that it is not empty.

This summer the two families arrive at Beldame with a funeral behind them and a divorce ahead of them. Among them are Luker McCray, down from New York, and his young daughter India, and their stay coincides with the house next door making its presence felt.

McDowell writes a slow, sunlit kind of horror in which the heat, the moving sand and the families' own tempers do as much of the work as the thing in the abandoned house. He later wrote the Blackwater series and the screenplay for Beetlejuice.