New York Times bestselling author Robert McCammon, author of
Swan Song, Stinger, and MINE, creates a marvelous
new novel of mystery and unforgettable storytelling power set in the
American South.
The year is 1964. On a cold spring morning before the sun, Cory
Mackenson is accompanying his father on his milk delivery route.
Without warning a car appears in the road before them and plunges into
a lake some say is bottomless. Cory's father makes a desperate attempt
to save the driver, but instead comes face-to-face with a vision that
will haunt and torment him: a dead man handcuffed to the steering
wheel, naked and savagely beaten, a copper wire knotted around his
neck. The lake's depths claim the car and the corpse, but the
murderer's work is unfinished as, from that moment, both Cory and his
father begin searching for the truth.
The small town of Zephyr, Alabama, has been an idyllic home for Cory
and his friends. But now, the murder of an unknown man who lies in the
dark lake, his tortured soul crying out for justice, causes Cory's
life to explode into a kaleidoscope of clues and deepening puzzles.
His quest to understand the forces of good and evil at work in his
hometown leads him through a maze of dangers and fascinations: the
vicious Blaycock clan, who defend their nefarious backwoods trades
with the barrels of their guns; a secret assembly of men united by
racial hatred; a one-hundred-six-year-old black woman named the Lady
who conjures snakes and hears voices of the dead; a reptilian thing
that swims in the belly of a river; and a bicycle with a golden
eye.
As Cory searches for a killer, he learns more about the meaning of
both life and death. A single green feather leads him deeper into the
mystery, and soon he realizes not only his life, but the sanity of his
father may hang in the balance.
Welcome to the imagination of Robert McCammon, the New York
Times bestselling author who now takes us on a whirlwind voyage
into the realm where innocence and evil are on a collision course.
Boy's Life is a tour de force of magic and wonder, a journey
that is at once joyful, unrelentingly mysterious, and hauntingly
poignant.
--From the dust jacket of the Pocket Books hardcover edition of
Boy's Life, first published in August 1991.
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