The Innocence of Youth

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.

Desert Bloom

So, I found out recently that Gregory Hinton had written a sequel to his Cathedral City, and thus did Desperate Hearts show up in my mail a few days later.

While it's mostly the same cast, the situation in Cathedral City is quite a bit changed from where we left it. Father Gene has been removed from St. Louis Church, and the new priest cares more about his new upscale parishioners than the dispossessed seniors and Mexicans that had been the backbone of the parish. Solia, of the port wine birthmark, works at the church when not babysitting Kenny and Maria's baby Concha. Maria is busy running her restaurant, although the clientele is not the same as when Nick and Kenny ran it. Ruthie still sings at Maria's, but the new clientele doesn't seem to care that much. Kenny and Nick are in Reno, still keeping secrets from each other. Pablo is back in Cathedral City after graduating from Stanford.

We also have new characters Bambi and Madonna, the mixed race lesbian couple that delivers produce; Officer Bob, the Border Patrol agent; and Sister Agnes, the nun at St. Louis who harbors more than a few secrets of her own.

The plot has a few different centers as it meanders around, what with Bambi and Madonna's involvement in smuggling a pregnant woman across the border, Pablo's romance with Bob, Ruthie's detox from anti depressants that eventually leads to her kidnapping of Concha and eventual death in a flood, and Nick and Kenny's revelations. We also finally get a bit of closure with Inez and Thomas, as Inez comes back to Cathedral City to be with her family as Thomas dies of El SIDA. We also have the odd case of Solia and her birthmark removal following it taking on the shape of the Virgin of Guadelupe.

While the first book was heavy on the pathos, this one is much darker by turns, with touches of the mystical sprinkled throughout. Indeed, while everyone does eventually get a happy ending through quirks of fate, I felt like most of that was a forced Deus ex Machinae, as none of this would likley have ended up as well in reality. Still worth reading though.

This seemed appropriate

So, along about the time the Stay-At-Home orders started, I wound up ordering a new copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which, thankfully, unlike my old copy that I think I donated to the local homeless library a few years back, is the Complete and Uncut version. (There are noticeable differences between versions; the first time I read it was right after the release of the long version. Then several years back, I picked up the original published version on paperbackswap.)

Anyway, for those who've never swam across the ocean that is the 1200 pages...

The set up revolves around a superflu that breaks out in 1990. A manmade shifting antigen flu. With 99.6% fatality rate. That escapes from a California lab with a security guard who gets out before everything locks down. Most of the first hundred pages take us through the initial outbreak and the plethora of death that accompanies it, giving us glimpses of our main characters before the world after gets going. We meet Stu, a quiet man in East Texas, who is one of the first immunes identified by the government, since he was one of the first in contact with Patient Zero. We meet Frannie, of Ogunquit, Maine, who has just found out she's pregnant. We meet Larry, who's new single is going up the charts, but whom is in deep debt following living the high life on the royalties. We meet Nick, a deaf-mute who we first meet getting mugged in Arkansas.

And people die. Quite a few people die. If not of flu, but of the aftermath. Stu, who was sent first to Atlanta, and then to Vermont, winds up meeting Glen, and then hooking up with Frannie and Harold, who is the brother of Frannie's now deceased best friend. Larry escapes from New York with Rita, who ends up ODing upstate. He then meets Nadine and Joe, who have their own issues. Nick meets Tom, a mildly retarded man, and they eventually meet Ralph. In the background, we have The Dark Man, Randal Flagg, and Mother Abigail, the 108 year old black woman who still bakes her own biscuits. And Lloyd. Lloyd who's in prison after being part of a tristate murder spree. The Dark Man breaks Lloyd out of jail eventually, and they head west. Oh yes, and we can't forget The Trashcan Man, who's a pyromaniac who starts turning refineries on Lake Michigan into giant bombs.

Anyway, survivors are all having dreams of both The Dark Man and Mother Abigail, so everyone starts moving West to Nebraska or Vegas. Mother Abigail is in Nebraska, and is other directed by G-d. Although G-d sends a vision to Mother Abigail, so everyone winds up in Boulder, where a rumor during the plague meant a large scale evacuation and the lack of humidity makes for a lack of rot.

Everyone has adventures getting cross country, picking up people as they go. Boulder tries to restart a government, Vegas is ruled with an iron fist by a psycho who's crucifying those who cross him. Nadine and Harold end up switching sides, cause issues, and four of the men end up walking from Boulder to Vegas. Then we get a few hundred pages after the climax of two people trying to get back to Boulder.

In any book this large, any reread is going to uncover things you missed on previous readings. Like, in modern parlance, Harold is essentially an Incel. Like the ending likely taking place somewhere other than the Earth of the rest of the book. (Mind you, if you wade through The Dark Tower, The Dark Man shows up quite a bit there, as well as in The Eyes of the Dragon, so this makes sense.)

Is this my favorite King? No, that still belongs to either It or The Waste Land. Is it good King? Yeah, because the pacing, despite the volume, keeps it going for the most part. Mind you, it's the hundred of so pages of story afted the Climax that keeps it from being downright stellar, but....