How the little-known American saga ‘Blackwater’ sold almost two million novels in Europe

Dominique Bordes had some doubts about the book. The business prospects alone were enough to make one shudder.

A huge novel of more than 1,000 pages, it was published in 1983 in the United States. Written by Michael McDowell — a deceased author, unknown in Europe — it had more or less been forgotten over time. A work of terror — though not very frightening — the story had gripped only a few readers. Why on Earth, then, was a French publisher dying to buy the rights four decades later?

Perhaps Bordes was motivated by the motto of his own publishing house, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: “We’re guided by the search for the surprising book… the one that nobody expected and yet, once read, becomes obvious.” There was also the endorsement by Stephen King, who had publicly expressed his enthusiasm for the text. And Bordes loves literary sagas about families. Although perhaps his decision was, above all, a matter of instinct. “Time and again, I found myself with that book. There was something worth exploring,” he recalls. When his offer arrived at the remote little blue house in a Massachusetts town where Jane Otte lived — the octogenarian agent and friend of McDowell — she said yes. It wasn’t as if she had received any other proposals to buy the foreign rights for the book.

Today, the rest of French publishers have more than 1,150,000 reasons to curse themselves. This is the number of copies of Blackwater that have been sold in the country to-date. Along with 300,000 in Italy and 300,000 in Spain.

The numbers keep rising. On average, across Europe, more than 2,000 new readers a day have ended up trapped in the small town of Perdido, Alabama — the literary saga’s setting — since Bordes discovered the work in April 2022. The Caskey family and their lives have inspired book clubs, discussion groups, Telegram channels, podcasts, queues in bookstores and TikTok videos. An unstoppable and mysterious phenomenon, it represents the idea of quality literature for everyone.

“I’m a commercial writer and I’m proud of that,” said Alabama-born Michael McDowell, according to a 2009 article in The Independent. “I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.” The text reported that, at the time, his creations were out of print in the United Kingdom. Not for nothing, the caption of the report read: “Forgotten Author No. 36.” Some film buffs may remember him for the script for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) — put together in collaboration with Tim Burton — or for Beetlejuice (1988), as a solo writer.

Novels such as The Elementals (1981) — the strange detective saga about waiter Daniel Valentine and his friend Clarisse Lovelace — or the Jack and Susan trilogy, about a couple kissed by eternal youth, earned him good sales, a cult following… and the label of being a bit strange. Of course, today, one would say that he was merely ahead of his time.

Born in Enterprise, Alabama in 1950, McDowell was openly gay and an avowed Democrat. He was given to narrating matriarchies, queer contexts, using pseudonyms and mixing genres. A graduate of Harvard, he aspired to be a professor of literature. In the end, however, he was capable of erudition, without ever moving away from the general public.

He wrote around 30 books in his life. They were set in Alabama during the Great Recession, or in New York in the middle of the Gilded Age. His stories were sprinkled with fantasy, humor, fear, anxiety and magical realism. He died from AIDS in December 1999, at the young age of 49.

In his brief profile on Wikipedia, Blackwater isn’t even mentioned. In the European publishing market, on the other hand, there are hardly any professionals who aren’t familiar with the saga. “His writing is totally focused on the reader. It’s tremendously effective — [he] has a very cinematic way of narrating events. And then, there are his obsessions: death, its omnipresence. And the family, what it does to us and what we do to it,” says Bordes.

“[The series] mixes many elements. And [McDowell] is very clever at leaving small clues, so that you sense that something is going to happen,” adds Sabine Schultz, from Neri Pozza, the Italian publisher of Blackwater. “It’s addictive — you consume it like a series. It appeals to very different audiences, taking back the idea of what popular literature is. It’s very modern,” adds Jan Martí, editor of Blackie Books, which launched it in Spain this year.

Blackwater has been released in its original format throughout Europe, just as McDowell conceived it: six books, pocket-sized and fairly priced. Another wink from the author to the reader.

After all, McDowell published paperbacks. “Collections of very cheap works for mass consumption… mainly pulp novels. Thrillers, or horror,” Martí sums up. “I write so that people can read my books with pleasure,” the author claimed, according to his Spanish editor. So much so that one scene was repeated identically among the audiences of three publishing houses: whoever opened the first book didn’t stop until they finished the sixth.

“There was a time when, in our cafeteria, the only thing people talked about was Blackwater,” Schultz recalls. And she adds: “I don’t remember anyone asking: ‘What if this doesn’t work?’”

A year earlier, Bordes had taken the same plunge. And, since then, he has more than landed on his feet. The good reception of the series in France convinced both Neri Pozza and Blackie Books: they both took a dive. As a result, the little house in Massachusetts quickly received two other offers, with no competitors this time, either.

The French publisher also laid out the launch strategy. It took him two years to prepare it. “The decision to print six books instead of one caused dozens of problems that had to be anticipated and resolved: how would we talk about them? How would we launch them? When? At what price? How would we convince readers to return to the bookstore five times?” Among many other good choices, Bordes worked very hard on finding the right person to draw the covers. Finally, he chose the Spanish illustrator Pedro Oyarbide.

“I didn’t know McDowell. I had the opportunity to read the whole saga before I started sketching, which helped me gather a multitude of notes and ideas. The covers, spines and backs are fully illustrated and full of elements, with small references to the story,” the artist notes. Neri Pozza and Blackie Books used the same images — another testament to their value. At the major Italian book fairs, there were queues to get a signature from Oyarbide.

“Since Blackwater was published in Spain, there’s rarely a day that I don’t come across the books, whether in bookshops, in the newspaper, in people’s hands on the metro… [the series] has almost become a collector’s item,” the illustrator concludes. It took a year of work, but the result has already lasted for two years.

“I organized so many things for Blackwater that, when the first book came out, I wrote to everyone who had participated [in the launch] to tell them that I was proud that we had done everything we could, no matter what happened next,” Bordes adds. Well, what happened next was that there were weeks when all six books in the series were simultaneously among the top 10 bestsellers in France. At Neri Pozzi, they also spared no effort and resources: trailers, podcasts, newsletters, a trickle of advertisements, postcards with the prologue, a promotional campaign supported by several TikTokers…

“[It was] the most articulated marketing plan in the history of our publishing house,” Schultz sighs. And this despite the fact that both labels rarely work with highly-commercial books: when potential success is at odds with quality, they pride themselves on always choosing the latter. The good thing is that Blackwater brought both together.

Because of this, Blackie Books doesn’t shy away from comparing McDowell to Honoré de Balzac or Alexander Dumas. Of course, the editors also evoke TV series — such as Lost or Succession — to describe the saga, including the almost soccer-like passions in favor of the disturbing Elinor, or her unbreakable mother-in-law, Mary-Love.

Martí shares one of the phrases he most often hears from Spanish readers: “It’s gotten me out of a very long funk.” And the town where the plot of Blackwater is brewing already occupies its place on the literary map where Macondo, Hogwarts, or Yoknapatawpha have been for decades. Bordes explains it like this: “Although it exists [in real life], the town was recreated by the author. It’s an imaginary territory that follows its own rules. This creates the strange sensation for the reader that, as soon as they start, they immediately know where they are.”

Almost two million Europeans already know every corner of the town: the dreaded crossing between the rivers, the dam, the sawmills, the Black neighborhood of Baptist Bottom. Those who return from such a long journey normally ask to start off again as soon as they can.

The three publishers subsequently acquired the rights to more of McDowell’s works. This time, however, there was no need to go to the little house in Massachusetts: Mrs. Otte had handed over the management of the author’s rights to a large agency. “It seemed impossible that we could continue publishing him, because the figures they were asking us for were unaffordable… it seemed unfair. We decided to talk to her again, we showed her everything we had done for Blackwater... and, in the end, she asked that Blackie Books continue publishing McDowell,” Martí recalls.

Starting in 2025, little by little, McDowell’s European publisher will print all of his work. But now, there are no doubts about what will happen in the market.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition