So, Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life has been on the TBR pile for a while now, but it's taken some time for me to actually get around to reading it. Now, a quick perusal of wikipedia shows McCammon was popular in the late 80's to early 90's, during the horror boom that Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and John Saul were all household names, but for some reason, despite my brother having a few titles on his shelf, I never read any of his stuff. As such, it shouldn't come to anyone's surprise that his works draws comparisons to the others' work mentioned. Which is sad, since even if Boy's Life shares a few passing similarities with IT, it's really got more in common with John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
We open on Cory, 11 years old in 1964 Zephyr, Alabama, in the early Spring of 1964. Cory's dad delivers milk for the local dairy, and occasionally Cory will make the rounds with his father. Which is nice, until the morning they round a curve by Saxon's Lake in time to see a car go across the road and into the lake. Cory's dad swims out to try to rescue the driver, only to find that the man is lead, bludgeoned in the head and garroted by a wire. He has a visible tattoo of a skull with wings. Cory, in the meantime, also notices someone watching and finds a green feather on his shoe. Keep in mind, we see this at the start, but it really doesn't wind up having much to do with anything until the very end, as the story keeps wandering around like a boy on a bike and nowhere in particular to be.
Anyway, Cory's dad is a bit upset by this, obviously. He spends most of the book getting more and more despondent as he's haunted by the man in his dreams.
On Good Friday, we see the Parade, when the elderly black woman, The Lady, from the town across the Gargoyle Bridge (with busts of Confederate Soldiers) goes to the middle of the bridge with his husband, the Moon Man (who evidently has vitiligo; his face is half black and half white, thus the Moon Man moniker) goes to feed Ol' Moses, one of the local creatures that lives in the river. Except she calls it Damballah, and feeds it all kinds of fun things like chicken's feet and beef heart. Ol' Moses ain't feeling it this year, as he doesn't show up. Later on, when the rains won't quit, after the rains wake up the wasps in the Methodist steeple during Easter services, and the Tecumseh River starts flooding, Cory and his Dad join the rest of the men of Zephyr across the river in the Black town helping sandbag the flood waters (after much protests by some of the white folks.) While fighting the river, Cory comes face to face with Ol' Moses, saving a young black boy from the hungry sea monster by using the old cartoon trick of sticking a broom in its craw. This earns him the attention and affection of The Lady, who begins to find ways to help out Cory and his family.
We see his childhood adventures with his friends, we see him stumble into more adult matters that end up causing trouble down the road. We see him become a storyteller, winning a local writing contest. We meet the characters that inhabit the town. About 2/3 of the way through, he has dinner with Vernon, the local nudist whose dad owns most of the town. Vernon himself published a book, and his man-child speaking reveals that he set out top write a book about a southern community and the publishers wanted a hard boiled mystery. As such, Vernon edited in a mystery to his novel, which is pretty much how this all works out.
By the end, we do find out who killed the guy in the car and why, but not before we watch Cory confront death and learn to hold on to his boyhood. Indeed, one of the most affecting moments for me involved Cory's dog Rebel getting hit by a car and Cory's accidental zombification of the dog. Until the ghost of a dead boy comes to claim it.
While Cory is an unreliable narrator, his story is compelling and sad and joyous in equal amounts. It just takes its good sweet time to get there.
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