Boy's Life
Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson -- a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake -- and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father face-to-face with a terrible vision of death that will haunt him forever.
As Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to the forces of good and evil that are manifested in Zephyr. From an ancient, mystical woman who can hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of moonshiners, Cory must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of his hometown -- for his father's sanity and his own life hang in the
Stinger
by Robert R McCammon
from Pocket Books
The "stinger" is an alien bounty hunter that remains ominously hidden for most of the book, but appears to be an enormous wicked mixture of centipede and scorpion. The bounty it's after is the "good guy" of the tale--a waif-like being who invades the mind of a small girl to make its presence known. They both arrive in a hot, desolate West Texas town surrounded by the alkali dust and sagebrush of a flatland between mountains. And the battle begins. An unpretentious horror novel with memorable imagery, Stinger is this reviewer's favorite of Robert McCammon's. It has appealing characters. It has feuding motorcycle gangs. It even has a bit of a West Side Story romance between Anglo guy and Hispanic girl. Sure, it's a B-movie romp, but McCammon is earnest--he doesn't play it for laughs. The action is scary and horrifying, making for a long, satisfying read.
UNDER THE FANG [THE HORROR WRITERS OF AMERICA, INC. PRESENTS]
They Thirst
Usher's Passing
In this most gothic of Robert McCammon's novels, setting is key: the continuing saga of the Usher family (descended from the brother of Roderick and Madeline of Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher") takes place in the weird and picturesque heart of the North Carolina mountains. The haughty, aristocratic Ushers live in a mansion near Asheville; the poor but crafty mountain folk (whose families are just as ancient) live on Briartop Mountain nearby. At harvest time, when the book's action unfolds, the mountains are a blaze of color. Add to the mixture a sinister history of mountain kids disappearing every year, a journalist investigating those disappearances, a monster called "The Pumpkin Man," moldy books and paintings in a huge old library at the Usher estate, and a secret chamber with a strange device involving a brass pendulum and tuning forks--and you've got a splendid recipe for atmospheric horror.
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