Though it is both an endearing coming-of-age saga and a grotesque, Southern Gothic fable, let's not forget that, at heart, Edge of Dark Water is a great crime story. Soon they find themselves on the run from May Lynn's greedy family, as well as a mythic tracker named Skunk, who smells of death and wears his victims' body parts as jewelry. They plan to finance their journey with May Lynn's cache of stolen money, and that might just be their undoing. Dead set on making that dream come true, Sue Ellen and her two best friends plan to exhume May Lynn's corpse (in multiple pieces, mind you), burn it, and take the ashes on a river-and-road trip to Hollywood. The prettiest girl in town, May Lynn always dreamed of making it to Hollywood.
Set in the swampy backwaters of East Texas during the Great Depression, Edge of Dark Water tells the story of Sue Ellen, a teenage girl who uncovers the bloated, rotten corpse of her friend May Lynn while fishing with her father.
Lansdale's teenage narrator, with her blend of youthful naivety and old-before-her-age-wisdom, recalls Frankie from The Member of the Wedding, while the overarching sense of history and Southern mythology recalls Faulkner's geographic and genealogical sensibility. Lansdale's Edge of Dark Water (2012) in a nutshell. Imagine the literary love child of Carson McCullers and William Faulkner, but way more twisted, with a penchant for dismemberment, and a hell of a lot funnier.
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