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Tressa 's Reviews > Katie
Katie
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Back in the eighties I worked at a used bookstore and saw this book come cross the counter one day. The cover shows a silhouette of a girl holding a bloody hammer. The caption near the image states "Katie never killed with kindness." That was all I needed to buy this book and take it home. It is still in my prized McDowell collection and will never leave. If my house caught fire, it is one of the material possessions I'd weep over losing because it has long been out of print.
This book is eerie and gruesome. It starts off in 1863 and the first page describes how a woman is one-by-one stunting the growth of a litter of poodle pups with cheap gin. She is babysitting 9-year-old Katie, who wants to try. Katie shoves the syringe down the puppy's throat too hard, and it spits up the liquor and blood over Katie's dress. Furious, she brings her fist down into the puppy's stomach which pops, and then throws the thing out the window. And this is just the prologue.
A young woman named Philo gets an urgent letter from her grandfather, who fears for his life from his "caretakers"--the Slapes. The book is a flee-and-chase story involving the Slapes and Philo, who wants justice and the carpetbag full of money they took from her kin. It's a book that explores the greed of one cold-hearted, dysfunctional family.
I can only imagine the great books McDowell would have written if he hadn't died too soon.
This book is eerie and gruesome. It starts off in 1863 and the first page describes how a woman is one-by-one stunting the growth of a litter of poodle pups with cheap gin. She is babysitting 9-year-old Katie, who wants to try. Katie shoves the syringe down the puppy's throat too hard, and it spits up the liquor and blood over Katie's dress. Furious, she brings her fist down into the puppy's stomach which pops, and then throws the thing out the window. And this is just the prologue.
A young woman named Philo gets an urgent letter from her grandfather, who fears for his life from his "caretakers"--the Slapes. The book is a flee-and-chase story involving the Slapes and Philo, who wants justice and the carpetbag full of money they took from her kin. It's a book that explores the greed of one cold-hearted, dysfunctional family.
I can only imagine the great books McDowell would have written if he hadn't died too soon.
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Katie.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
January 1, 1985
–
Finished Reading
April 5, 2009
– Shelved
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Steve
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May 19, 2009 03:31PM
Tressa, I haven't read this one yet, but I do have it (I think I have most of his books -- which are getting hard to find). So it's crime and not horror? The cover did have me thinking of Lizzie Borden.
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Well, it's not horror in the supernatural/ghostly/monster sense. Although Katie has ESP and is a monster. At one point she reads fortunes for ladies who don't always make it out of their tenement room alive.This book is sort of hard to explain. It's more of a crime fiction with some very spooky, gruesome aspects to the story. You've got to read it if you're a fan of McDowell's. I've had my copy of Katie since the '80s. I couldn't even find a picture of the book online, so I can imagine how hard it might be to buy.
Katie is a gruesome, petulant, little monster of a girl being raised by a cold-hearted, money-grubbing stepmother and a dimwitted but violent father. The book is fabulous.
