Michael McDowell

McDowell’s story doesn’t exactly read like your average Hollywood bio. Born in Enterprise, Alabama, the guy bounced around a bit—Medford, Massachusetts for a while, then splitting time in Hollywood with his sister Ann and Peter Lake, who was basically Indiana Jones but with a camera. Mornings? All about the writing grind. Afternoons? He’d just stare out the window, maybe waiting for the universe to toss him something wild. Weirdly enough, he had a real thing for the macabre—snapping up photos of train decapitation victims (yeah, seriously) and little plaques from baby caskets. Not your standard stamp collection, that’s for sure. McDowell wasn’t flying solo, either. He spent three decades with Laurence Senelick, who knew his way around a theater stage and a director’s chair. The two of them? Strong partnership, both in love and in the arts. Sadly, McDowell’s story wrapped up in Boston in ’99, after he lost his fight with AIDS. But even after he was gone, his work didn’t just fade out. His last novel, Candles Burning, was still in pieces when he died—so Tabitha King (yep, Stephen King’s wife) stepped in and finished it up, and it finally landed on shelves in 2006. All in all, McDowell was a guy who lived on the edges—chasing stories, collecting the strange, and leaving a mark that’s anything but boring.