Boy's Life
by Robert R. McCammon
Summary
Zephyr, Alabama, 1964: twelve year old Cory Mackenson is riding the milk route with his father before dawn when a car runs off the road into Saxon's Lake, water so deep the town calls it bottomless. His father dives after the driver and surfaces changed, because the man behind the wheel was dead before the water, handcuffed to the wheel, beaten, garrotted, and the lake takes him anyway. The murder nobody else saw becomes the thread through Cory's year, and the year is the book: a full four seasons of Southern boyhood rendered at the pitch of myth.
McCammon's gamble is to let the magic and the mystery share the page without adjudication. Zephyr contains a triceratops in the river, or an old snapping turtle; a monster carnival; a hundred year old Black matriarch called the Lady who commands genuine powers, or genuine respect, the book declines to separate them; the town's ghosts, literal and civil rights era both, the Klan and a church bombing's shadow reaching in from the real 1964. Around the edges, Cory keeps pulling the murder's thread, a green feather, a tattooed arm, a piano wire garrotte, until it leads where the reader least wants it to, and the boy detective plot resolves into something sadder: the discovery that adults are afraid, that the war never ended for some of them, and that growing up is mostly learning what the magic was protecting you from.
Around four hundred and forty pages in its original hardcover, episodic and headlong.
Best for readers who want the boyhood summer book done at full scale, Bradbury's territory with a body in the lake.
Historical Context & Significance
Boy's Life won the Bram Stoker Award for 1991 and the World Fantasy Award for best novel, a double that measured how far past genre walls it travelled, and it has kept travelling: the novel found readers far beyond the horror audience, and its readers' devotion has the flavour usually reserved for childhood classics because for many it was one.
For McCammon it was the summit and the breaking point together: the book vindicated his push out of the horror category, but the fight with publishers who wanted the old product contributed to his walking away from the industry within a few years, a withdrawal the genre still talks about, ended a decade later by the Matthew Corbett novels.
Its Alabama is his own, Zephyr built from his Birmingham childhood, and the book's standing has only compounded: still carrying devoted readers decades on.