It is not every day that a work by an unknown and dead author becomes an editorial bombshell. This is what is happening with ‘Blackwater’, a novel published by Michael McDowell (Enterprise, 1950-Boston, 1999) in six installments in 1983. The family and fantasy saga is approaching 200,000 copies sold in Spain of its six volumes, in Spanish and Catalan. Blackie Books, the house responsible for the phenomenon, will publish five more McDowell novels starting in 2025.
These are ‘The Amulet’, ‘Cold Moon Over Babylon’, ‘Gilded Needles’, ‘The Elementals’ and ‘Katie’. All five of them predate ‘Blackwater’ and none of them have ever seen the light of day in Spain. In fact, before ‘Blackwater‘Voices of silence’ had only been published by McDowell in Spain, a fiction that the writer left unfinished at his death and which he finished Tabitha King, Stephen King’s wife. The Argentine label La Bestia Equilátera has published ‘Agujas dorados’, ‘Los elementales’ and ‘Katie’.
The negotiation
Buying the rights to ‘Blackwater’ was easy and cheap for Blackie. The French publisher Monsieur Toussaint Louverture made the discovery and he tipped off his friends from the Barcelona brand. “Among ‘indies’ we tell each other about the finds,” says Jan Martí, editor of Blackie. “We acquire ‘Blackwater‘ when it had not yet been released in France for a super low price.” The French edition was followed by the Italian, the German and the Spanish, all of them successes.
But, now that’Blackwater‘ has exploded on a European scale and has revealed a master of popular literature, McDowell’s work is no longer a bargain. The agent carrying her informed Blackie that she had received offers from large Spanish publishers for the author’s novels. The label had to start a negotiation in which her main argument was the love and care she had put into the label. ‘Blackwater’ edition. Finally, the intervention of the 84-year-old woman who serves as executor of the estate of his friend McDowell from a town in Massachusetts, with whom Blackie had initially dealt, tipped the matter in his favor.
the good guys win
“The whole story with McDowell has a feeling like the good guys win, sorry,” says Martí. “It’s a bit of an editorial adventure, without much interest, but I want to emphasize that the alliance between ‘indies’ and the sincere communication of our way of working with the heart, have worked.
Blackie still does not know in what order he will edit the five contracted McDowell novels, but he does know that he will not publish them before 2025. The decision suggests that he sees the rope for ‘Blackwater’ for a whilewhose first volume, ‘La riada’, was the fifth best-selling fiction book in Catalan in Sant Jordi and the sixth in Spanish.
Investigation
Blackie plans to investigate “a lot more” into McDowell’s work now that he has also achieved the first option over the rest of your work. There is a lot to investigate.
With his name the author also wrote, for example, the series of three novels starring Jack and Susanwho are always 27 years old and destined to fall in love whether in 1913, 1933 or 1953. With the pseudonym Nathan Aldyne and in partnership with Dennis Schuetz, he signed four ‘noir’ fictions in which the tandem formed by Daniel Valentine and Clarisse Lovelace shares the spotlight with the gay Boston. Like Preston Macadam He entered the secret agent genre with the character Michel Sheriff. And so.
The sequel to ‘Bitelchús’
In the audiovisual field, McDowell participated in the writing of ‘Bitelchús‘ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, both films by Tim Burton. Attention: in the first trailer for ‘Bitelchús Bitelchús’, a sequel to ‘Bitelchús’ also directed by Burton and scheduled for release in September, It makes it very clear that the film is based on the characters created by McDowell and Larry Wilson. Everything indicates that McDowell is going to stop being a minority cult author, if he has not already stopped being one. The writer was a screenwriter for episodes of anthology series such as ‘Amazing stories’ (created by Steven Spielberg), ‘Tales from the darkside’ (created by George A. Romero) or ‘Tales from the crypt’ (created by William Gaines and Steven Dodd ). Stephen King is his number one fan and Mariana Enríquez became evangelist by McDowell after discovering it in the editions of The Equilateral Beast.
