Dear Readers:
I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to my next novel,
MINE, which will be published in hardcover by Pocket Books in
May.
I sat down to write a ghost story. When I finished, I'd written
MINE. Not exactly what I'd started out to do, and certainly
not a ghost story in the traditional sense, but a ghost story all the
same. MINE is the story of a past era, and a walking dead
woman haunted by the specters of what used to be.
Mary Terror, a woman lost in time, yearns for the days of radical
militancy and the underground presses, an era of black-light posters,
roach clips, strawberry incense and psychedelic dreams. She remembers
like the touch of an old lover the violence of those times—the
clashes with "the pigs" on college campuses, the Weather
Underground's bombings, the rage of the Black Panthers, the cold
calculations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Her own angry band of
brothers and sisters—the Storm Front—is long gone, destroyed by
the police in a shootout in 1972 that also took the life of her unborn
child. Mary Terror escaped the inferno, and she's lived alone, on the
run from the murders of her past, since 1972. She talks to God in her
room, and listens to his commands at thirty-three and a third
revolutions per minute. She waits like a coiled-up snake, an arsenal
of guns around her, and she sniffs the air for the bitter, hated scent
of pigs. Mary Terror is insane. Mary Terror is deadly.
And Mary Terror wants a baby.
What happened to those children of the sixties who learned the
language of hatred, who swore oaths upon their bloodstained manifestos
and vowed to never surrender? What happened to those soul survivors,
when the clock of hours ran out on their day and the night came on
fast and brutal and lonely? What happened to them, when the world
stopped watching?
Most of them changed. Took off their bell-bottoms and cut their hair
and merged into the stream that leads always into the future. Most of
them married, had families, and now fret about rap music and their
kids getting into drugs. Most of them went on.
But Mary Terror, with blood on her hands and darkness in her heart,
has a different destination. Back into the twisted maze of the past,
back into the domain of bombs and guns and highways heading toward a
dream of glory across a haunted land.
Mary Terror is going to go back, in a search to recapture her youth
and the days of the Storm Front, the best days of her life.
And this time she's going with a baby in her arms.
Even if the child is not her own.
So, a ghost story? Yes, I think MINE is. The ghosts of a time
and place. The ghosts of what used to be, whispering from the
yellowed pages of a Rolling Stone. Mary Terror's journey, into
that land where the past and present meet in a violent and inexorable
collision, is about to begin.
Robert McCammon
