Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality, but there is, unseen by

most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit, a dark side.

Suitopod Episode 775 for September 17th, 2021. Miss Mack by Michael McDowell.

I'm Alex, co-editor of Suitopod, your host this week. We celebrate another milestone with

775 episodes and continue our 15th anniversary celebration. For these milestones we like to bring

you a gem that some may find obscure and many have forgotten, and we're excited to bring you

an Alabama Gothic from the 80s courtesy of Michael McDowell. McDowell was born in 1950

in Enterprise, Alabama. He received a BA in an MA from Harvard College and a PhD in English

from Brandes University in 1978, based on a dissertation entitled American Attitudes Towards Death,

1825 to 1865. McDowell's partner was theatre historian and director Lawrence Sennelick,

who he met in 1969. McDowell and Sennelick remained together for 30 years until McDowell's

AIDS-related death in 1999. McDowell specialized in collecting death memorabilia. His extensive

and diverse collection, which reportedly filled over 76 boxes, included items such as death pins,

photographs, and plaques from infant caskets. After his death, the collection was acquired by

Chicago's Northwestern University, where it went on display in 2013. While I will speak more about

his prose in the outro, two of his best known works are the screenplays for Beetlejuice and the

Nightmare Before Christmas. One of his final projects, upon which he was working at the time of his

death, was a sequel to Beetlejuice. Miss Mack was first published in the 1986 anthology,

Halloween Horrors. Our narrator this week is Jessica Nettles. Jessica grew up with one

foot in the real world and the other in a world mixed with dabs of spiritual belief, science fiction

and fantasy dreams, and spooky experiences that she, nor her family, could quite explain.

At age 11, she found the perfect outlet for this bizarre childhood in the form of writing.

...