By Robert McCammon
1984 Ballantine
Paperback, 419 pages
Art by Jim Thiesen
This is another one that I
bought way back when it first came out and never got around to reading. That’s
fine because if this had been my first McCammon, I might not have gone on and
read any other books by him. Not that this one is bad, it’s just not
very satisfying to me for a lot of reasons. One reason is not the
writing. McCammon is an excellent writer, even when the story isn’t super
engaging. That’s how I was able to finish this behemoth of a paperback.
Hawthorn, Alabama is where John
and Ramona Creekmore and their 10-year old son Billy live. Ramona is one
quarter Choctaw and has the ability to not only sense someone’s impending death
(a black aura surrounds them) but she can take on the pain of wandering spirits
and put them to rest. Of course, in racist Alabama in 1962, this makes her the
Hawthorn Witch and she is ostracized by the community. Now, Billy is showing
signs of having similar extraordinary abilities and churchgoing John and the
local shitheads are mad that there are two of them. At a tent revival in town, with
charlatan J. J. Falconer and his son Wayne (who is a faith healer), the Mother
and Son cause a real scene and are forced to leave.
The story follows Billy as well
as Wayne, two kids of the same age, both seeming to have special abilities. It
follows them to their teens and high school, up through their late teens and
into their early twenties. It is a good versus evil thing going on but Billy,
despite being unchristian, is not the evil one. The Falconers have been
all about the money all along, being the crooked Evangelicals that they are.
Once both boys are fatherless, their true emotional boundaries are revealed and
they hitch up with very different groups of people who “help” them on their way
through their personal Mystery Walks.
It is an epic tale, for sure. Unfortunately,
it reads as though McCammon thought up the next part each time he got to it,
stringing together a bunch of different ideas and scenarios with the characters
playing along. I guess it all fits by the end but there’s so much extraneous
exposition that I was getting fidgety. The typeface is small and dense (41
lines per page) and the book just went on and on. I stayed with it thanks to
McCammon’s excellent writing style but the story meandered and the characters,
even though the story is about the boys’ personal growth, never really develop.
Incredible things get accepted too rapidly and, well… it made me sigh a lot,
wishing I was finished.
This was McCammon’s first book
to be published in paperback, the Ballantine book coming out a year after its
hardcover from Holt. The first edition Ballantine cover pretty much sucks but
later printings had a nice crawling corpse cover by Jim Thiesen.