First published in 1979, Michael McDowell’s The Amulet takes place in a small Alabama town in 1965.  It’s a town that is home to a factory that constructs rifles.  The town’s entire livelihood revolves around the business of guns and, with the Vietnam War heating up, it looks like business is going to be good.  Unfortunately, that’s little comfort to Dean Howell, a local man who is disfigured and left in an apparent vegetative state after a rifle that he’s testing explodes in his face.

Sarah, Dean’s young wife, tries to take care of Dean while also working at the factory and dealing with Dean’s incredibly spiteful mother, Jo.  Angered over her son’s disfigurement, Jo seeks revenge by giving an amulet to Sarah’s boss.  What Jo doesn’t tell anyone is that the amulet is cursed and whoever wears it will end up killing their family and then killing themselves.  The amulet passes from one hand to another, leading to more and more violent deaths.  When Sarah and her friend Becca realize what’s happening, they try to track down the amulet.  It all leads to an increasingly over-the-top bloodbath and a twist ending.

The Amulet is an enjoyably gruesome horror story that works as long as you don’t spend too much time trying to understand the logic of the amulet.  At first, it seems like a pretty simple curse.  The person who wears the amulet is driven to kill their loved ones and then themselves.  By the end of the book, though, the amulet seems to have the power to possess both buildings and machines which leads us to wonder whether or not machines actually have loved ones.  As a writer, McDowell goes more for shock than narrative consistency but, fortunately, he writes with enough style that he pulls it off.  McDowell shows a flair for macabre small town drama and the ending is appropriately unsettling.

This was Michael McDowell’s first published novel.  He would go on to write several more novels, along with working on the screenplays for Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Thinner.