Showing results by author "Michael McDowell" in All Categories

After a bizarre and disturbing incident at the funeral of matriarch Marian Savage, the McCray and Savage families look forward to a restful and relaxing summer at Beldame, on Alabama's Gulf Coast, where three Victorian houses loom over the shimmering beach. Two of the houses are habitable, while the third is slowly and mysteriously being buried beneath an enormous dune of blindingly white sand. But though long uninhabited, the third house is not empty.

Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido’s first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations.

Seducing a proper Bostonian was easy. Making him die of a heart attack a week after the wedding was hardly any trouble at all. Now she has money, social status, everything she has cunningly schemed to get since she was a poor little girl. Everything except the Brookline mansion and the multi-million dollar trust fund left to the three children. But what wicked stepmother couldn't get rid of three children?

When Philo Drax receives a letter from her wealthy grandfather saying he fears for his life at the hands of the vicious Slape family, she rushes to the rescue. But too late! Katie Slape, a monstrous girl with psychic powers and a penchant for smashing skulls with her hammer, has already finished him off and gotten hold of his cash.

Welcome to Babylon, a typical sleepy Alabama small town, where years earlier the Larkin family suffered a terrible tragedy. Now they are about to endure another: 14-year-old Margaret Larkin will be robbed of her innocence and her life by a killer who is beyond the reach of the law. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue, a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink, graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror.

Welcome to the Black Triangle, New York's decadent district of opium dens, gambling casinos, drunken sailors, gaudy hookers, and back room abortions. The queen of this unsavory neighborhood is Black Lena Shanks, whose family leads a ring of female criminals-women skilled in the art of cruelty. Only a few blocks away, amidst the elegant mansions and lily-white reputations of Gramercy Park and Washington Square, lives Judge James Stallworth.

When a rifle range accident leaves Dean Howell disfigured and in a vegetative state, his wife Sarah finds her dreary life in Pine Cone, Alabama made even worse. After long and tedious days on the assembly line, she returns home to care for her corpselike husband while enduring her loathsome and hateful mother-in-law, Jo. Jo blames the entire town for her son’s mishap, and when she gives a strange piece of jewelry to the man she believes most responsible, a series of gruesome deaths is set in motion.

When her daddy is tortured and murdered by two women with no discernible motivation, Calley and her mother find themselves caught up in inexplicable events that exile them to Pensacola Beach. There, another woman awaits their presence, a woman who knows what Calley is and who seeks to control her. For Calley is no ordinary little girl.

Faced with an alarming image of Han as a battered hostage of the Yevetha, Chewbacca takes on an urgent mission. Meanwhile, Leia calls upon the Senate to take a stand and eliminate the Yevetha threat. As a former Imperial governor takes his battle to the runaway Qella spaceship, Luke's continuing search for his mother brings him dangerously close to Nil Spaar's deadly forces. And as the Yevetha close in on the forces of the New Republic, Luke takes a desperate gamble with an invisible weapon.

As Leia must deal with a new threat to the fragile alliance that binds the New Republic, Lando becomes a prisoner aboard a runaway spacecraft of unknown origin. The ship is following an unstoppable path to its homeworld, destroyed by Imperial forces. Luke continues his quest to learn more about his mother among the Fallanassi, where his every belief about the use of the Force is about to be challenged.

It is a time of tranquility for the New Republic. But the peace is short-lived. Luke must journey to his mother's homeworld in a desperate and dangerous quest to find her people. An adventurous Lando must seize a mysterious spacecraft that has weapons of enormous destructive power. And Leia, a living symbol of the New Republic's triumph, must face down a ruthless leader of the Duskhan League, an arrogant Yevetha who seems bent on a genocidal war.

The Project Habit provides small doable shifts for busy teachers looking to enhance and innovate their practices. It aims to ensure students develop substantial growth in establishing agency in their own learning, developing rigorous academic content knowledge, and contributing that knowledge and skills to solve real-world problems. The book offers easy-to-implement practices in inquiry-based learning that any teacher can pick and be assured that whether they are done one at a time or all together, they are backed by sound research in teaching and learning.

Después de un extraño incidente en el funeral de la matriarca Marian, las familias McCray y Savage esperan un tranquilo verano en la costa del golfo de Alabama, donde tres antiguas casas victorianas se elevan en la soledad de una playa abrasadora. Dos de las casas son habitables, mientras que la tercera está siendo invadida por la arena: entre sus paredes, algo desconocido se encuentra al acecho. Algo que ha atemorizado a varios miembros de la familia y que aún los persigue en pesadillas. Algo atroz que parece listo para atacar de nuevo.

A new era has begun for the Caskey family. Elinor’s relentless determination and the years of struggle are finally beginning to bear fruit: old hostilities have faded and the town is ripe for change. The conflict in Europe has brought new blood to Perdido, men arriving from far afield wanting to ingratiate themselves with the powerful family. But tangling with the Caskeys comes at a cost, and soon they must ask themselves how close is too close…

In un unico cofanetto tutti e sei i romanzi della saga di Blackwater. 1919. Le acque nere e minacciose del fiume sommergono la cittadina di Perdido, nel sud dell'Alabama. I ricchissimi Caskey devono fronteggiare il disastro. Ma il clan, capeggiato dalla potente matriarca Mary-Love e dal figlio Oscar, dovrà fare i conti anche con un'apparizione sconvolgente: dalle viscere della citta sommersa compare Elinor Dammert, con un passato misterioso e un oscuro disegno.

Perdido, 1928. Torn apart by the continuing tensions between Mary-Love and her daughter-in-law Elinor, the Caskey family must also confront other crises. As the economy plummets and relationships sour, something sinister is prowling the darkest recesses of the Caskey household. Patient, implacable, waiting to catch its next victim in its deadly web…

As the dark and menacing waters of the local river submerge Perdido, a small town in the south of Alabama, the Caskeys - a family of rich landowners - must confront the tide of damage caused by the flood. Led by Mary-Love, the powerful matriarch, and by Oscar, her devoted son, the family must pick itself back up. But what they haven't anticipated is the sudden appearance of Elinor Dammert - a mysterious but seductive young woman with a troubling past. Her sole ambition appears to be to infiltrate the very heart of the Caskey clan...

1928, Perdido. Il clan Caskey è tormentato dalla diatriba tra Mary-Love ed Elinor. Ma all'orizzonte arrivano altre ombre: sui legami, sui patrimoni, sulle anime. E le ripercussioni varcheranno i confini dell'immaginazione. Da quando Elinor ha preso possesso della casa più bella di Perdido, negli angoli bui della magione si annidano ricordi spaventosi che, come ragni instancabili, tessono tele mortali.

"But come back soon", the sign said. Obviously it was a lie. The people in the grocery store just wanted to make sure he couldn't buy the spice he needed to make the recipe he'd selected for that night (recipes must be followed exactly). Obviously they wanted him to eat out...to meet the waitress, Marta, to see her horrible, unspeakable, unbearable ugliness. It was obvious to him: her maimed, twisted face was the living desire to be dead. He had to help Marta be dead.

The Black Berets had to hand it to Parkes, their former CIA case officer. First he’d sent them on a suicide mission to Vietnam. Then he’d sent some CIA hitmen to finish them off when the enemy couldn’t. And the moment they set foot stateside, the world’s meanest mercenaries found that Parkes had arranged another lethal welcome. Well, they’d never liked Parkes much. But how were they going to tell him? First they had to find him, and that would take Beeker, Rosie, Cowboy, Harry, and Marty, from the bayous of Louisiana to an academy of terror in the Libyan desert.