Mine
by Robert R. McCammon
Summary
Mary Terror was Mary Terrell once, a true believer in the Storm Front Brigade, a Weather Underground styled cell whose bombs and communiqués ended in a police shootout the group did not survive. Two decades later she is a heavy, scarred woman working nights in Atlanta, living inside an unended war: the Storm Front's leader, her lover, is out there somewhere, the baby she lost in the raid is a wound that never closed, and when she reads a coded personal ad she believes is his summons, she decides to bring him what they lost. She walks into a hospital maternity ward and takes a newborn.
The baby is David Clayborne, and his mother Laura is the novel's other half: a journalist whose marriage is quietly failing, three days postpartum, who discovers that the police machinery moves slower than a mother can stand. Laura goes after Mary herself, and McCammon runs the two women toward each other across the country, through the wreckage of the radical generation, safe houses gone suburban, old comrades grown respectable or mad, toward a final meeting in the California woods where the sixties went to die.
Mary is the creation the book is remembered for: sentimental and lethal in the same breath, murdering without registering it, tender toward the stolen child in ways more frightening than cruelty.
A big book with a thriller's velocity from first page to last.
Best for readers who want horror without the supernatural, where the monster is a decade's curdled idealism with a gun.
Historical Context & Significance
Mine won the Bram Stoker Award for 1990, McCammon's second win in four years, and marked the genre's turn, visible across the early nineties awards lists, from supernatural horror toward the human monster: Mary Terror stands with Annie Wilkes and Hannibal Lecter in the era's gallery of realistic monsters, the Stoker following the culture into serial killer and psycho thriller territory.
The book was also a statement in McCammon's own campaign to escape the horror label, the bridge between the apocalyptic fantasias that made his name and Boy's Life the following year; his publishers' resistance to that evolution led to the decade long withdrawal that became publishing legend.
Its radical underground material, the Storm Front standing in for the Weathermen, gave reviewers their frame: the sixties' unfinished business as literal revenant, a horror novel about what refuses to stay buried in the American twentieth century, no grave required.