From a French editor’s intuition to the football passion of Spanish readers: how ‘Blackwater’ sold almost two million novels in Europe

Dominique Bordes had some doubts. Although, in reality, not many. And that is, a priori, The business prospects were terrifying. A 1,000-page novel, published in the US in 1983 and more or less forgotten over time. By Michael McDowell, a deceased author unknown in Europe. A horror work, but not very scary, which had puzzled a few readers. Why on earth, then, was the French publisher dying to buy the rights four decades later?

Perhaps he was motivated by his motto own label, Monsieur Toussaint Louverture: “We are guided by the search for the surprising book, the one that no one expected and yet, once read, becomes obvious.” There was also the endorsement of Stephen King, who had publicly made clear his enthusiasm for that text. Finally, Bordes loved literary sagas about families. Although, perhaps, it was mostly a matter of instinct. “Time and again I found myself with that book. There was something worth exploring,” he says. 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 said yes. Not that she had received any more.

Today, the rest of French publishers have more than 1,150,000 reasons to bite their hands. As many as copies have been sold. Blackwater in the country. More about 300,000 in Italy. Many others in Spain, between Castilian and Catalan. And counting. More than 2,000 new readers a day, on average, have been trapped in the town of Perdido since Bordes discovered it in Europe, in April 2022. The Caskey family and their lives have inspired reading clubs, discussion groups, Telegram channels, podcastsqueues in bookstores, TikTok videos. In a word: furor. An unstoppable and mysterious phenomenon. Or perhaps very simply: quality literature for everyone.

““I am a commercial writer and I am proud of it. I think it is a mistake to try to write for posterity,” said Michael McDowell., According to an article by The Independent 2009. The text reported that, at that time, his creations were out of print in the United Kingdom. Not for nothing, the epigraph of the report read: “Forgotten author no. 36″. Perhaps some film buff remembered him for the script of Nightmare Before Christmasalong with Tim Burton, or Beetlejuice, solo. Novels such as The Elementalsthe strange detective saga of the waiter Daniel Valentine and his friend Clarisse Lovelace, or that of Jack and Susana couple kissed by eternal youth, had earned him good sales, a cult niche and also the label of peculiar. Although today it would be said that he was ahead of his time.

Born in Enterprise (USA) in 1950, a declared homosexual, a democrat, very given to narrating matriarchies, contexts queersigning with pseudonyms and mixing genres. A Harvard graduate, aspiring to become a university professor of literature, capable of erudition without ever straying from the masses. He left behind some 30 works, set in Alabama during the Great Recession or in New York at the height of the Golden Age, sprinkled with fantasy, humor, fear, anxiety or magical realism. All in just 49 years, before AIDS took him away in December 1999.

In his brief English profile on Wikipedia, he is not even mentioned. Blackwater. In the European publishing market, however, there are hardly any professionals who do not know the saga. “His writing is totally reader-centred, it is tremendously effective and he has a very cinematic way of narrating events. And then there are his obsessions: death, its omnipresence; and family, what it does to us and what we do to it,” lists Bordes. “He mixes many elements. And he is very clever at leaving little clues so that you sense that something is going to happen,” adds Sabine Schultz, from Neri Pozza, the Italian publishing house. “It is addictive and is consumed like a series; it appeals to very different audiences; it recovers the idea of ​​what popular literature is; it is very modern,” adds Jan Martí, editor of Blackie Books, which launched it in Spain this year. In its original format, as in France and Italy, just as McDowell conceived it: six books, pocket-sized and priced. Another nod from the author to the reader.

After all, McDowell published paperbacks, That is to say, “collections of very cheap works, and of mass consumption, mainly novels” pulpeither thrillersor horror,” Martí sums up. “I write so that people can read my books with pleasure,” the author claimed., according to its Spanish publisher. So much so that an identical scene was repeated in the three publishing houses, the same one that later spread to thousands of homes: whoever opened the first book did not stop until he finished the sixth. “There was a time when, in our dining room, the only thing that was talked about was Blackwater“I don’t recall anyone asking, ‘What if it doesn’t work? ’” Schultz recalls. “I don’t recall anyone asking, ‘What if it doesn’t work? ’”

A year earlier, Bordes had thrown himself down the same ravine. And he had landed more than on his feet. The good landing in France convinced both Neri Pozza and Blackie. And they both jumped in after him. So the little house in Massachusetts received two other offers: so fast that there were no competitors either.

The French publisher also set the path in the launch strategy. And no wonder: it took him “two years” to develop it. “The decision to print six books instead of one caused dozens of problems that had to be anticipated and resolved: how to talk about them? How to launch them? When? At what price? How to convince readers to return to the bookstore five times?”, he points out. Among many other good choices, Bordes worked very hard on the choice of covers. He looked for someone who could draw “poker cards.” He sifted. And, finally, he chose the Spaniard Pedro Oyarbide.

“I didn’t know McDowell. I had the opportunity to read the whole saga before I started sketching, which helped me to gather a lot of notes and ideas. Both the covers and the spines and backs are fully illustrated and full of elements and small references to the story,” says the artist. Neri Pozza and Blackie kept the same images, another example of their value. In Lucca and Turin, at two of the major Italian publishing fairs, there were queues to get an Oyarbide signature. “Since I started to work on the book, I have been working on it for a long time. Blackwater It was published in Spain and it is rare that a day goes by that I don’t come across the books, whether in bookshops, in the newspaper, or in people’s hands on the subway… It has almost become a collector’s item,” concludes the illustrator. It took a year of work. The result has already lasted two years. And there are still more to come.

“For Blackwater “I organised so many things that when the first book came out, I wrote to everyone who had participated to tell them that I was proud that we had done everything we could, no matter what happened next,” adds Bordes. What happened was that there were weeks when all six books in the series were simultaneously among the 10 bestsellers in France. At Neri Pozzi, they also spared no effort and resources: trailers, podcasts, newslettersa trickle of advertisements, postcards with the prologue, a campaign with several tiktokers. “The plan of marketing “The most articulated in the history of our publishing house,” says Schultz. And this is despite the fact that both labels rarely work with very 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.

That’s why Blackie Books isn’t afraid to compare McDowell to Honoré de Balzac or Alexander Dumas. Although the editors also evoke series like Lost either Succession to describe the saga, including the almost football-like passions in favour of the disturbing Elinor or her unbreakable mother-in-law, Mary-Love. Martí shares one of the phrases he hears most often among Spanish readers: “It has gotten me out of a very long block.” And the town where the plot of Blackwater It already occupies its place on the literary map where Macondo, Hogwarts, Yoknapatawpha and Comala have been for decades. Bordes explains it this way: “Although it exists, the town was recreated by the author. It is 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. In Lost.”

Almost two million Europeans already know every corner of the town. The dreaded river crossing. The dam. The sawmills. The black neighborhood of Baptist Bottom. Those who return from such a long journey usually ask to leave again as soon as they can. That is why the three labels 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 rights to a large agency. “It seemed impossible that we could continue publishing it, because the amounts they were asking for were unaffordable, and it seemed unfair to us. We decided to talk to her again, we showed her everything we had done for her.” Blackwater... and in the end he asked Blackie to continue publishing McDowell,” Martí recalls. Starting in 2025, little by little, they will publish all of his work. There are no doubts about what will happen in the market. Although, in reality, there never were any.