‘Boy’s Life’ a flashback to childhood
“Boy’s Life” by Robert McCammon is not a horror novel. It is, however, a coming-of-age adventure that captures the magic of childhood.
Cory Mackenson, 11, lives in Zephyr, Ala., during the 1960s. Zephyr is a small town full of mysteries, a place where a boy’s imagination can take wing. Cory and his father become involved in one such mystery, when they witness a car run off a road and plunge into Saxon Lake. Cory’s dad dives into the water to rescue the driver, only to find a dead man, beaten and strangled, handcuffed to the wheel. The dead man is a stranger, but the killer must be a local who knew the very deep lake would swallow the car, they speculate.
Cory’s dad has nightmares about the dead man, who seems to be haunting him. Cory is curious about the identity of the killer but also is preoccupied with the peculiarities of Zephyr: a river monster, moonshiners, a dinosaur, a voodoo lady, a wealthy but loony nudist.
The murder is the thread that weaves all the other tales together into “Boy’s Life.” Each adventure Cory and his friends have could be a short story on its own, and perhaps that’s what McCammon had in mind originally.
Cory, an aspiring writer, has dinner with the wealthy and naked Vernon, hearing about how Vernon wrote his own book.
“He wrote this book about the town, and the people in it who made it what it was. And maybe there wasn’t a real plot to it, maybe there wasn’t anything that grabbed you by the throat and tried to shake you until your bones rattled, but the book was about life. It was the flow and the voices, the little day-to-day things that make up the memory of living. It meandered like the river, and you never knew where you were going until you got there, but the journey was sweet and deep and left you wishing for more.”
Vernon found a publisher for his book. But the editors made him write a murder into the story — to turn it into a mystery and make it more marketable. Vernon felt as if he had “taken his child and he had dressed that beautiful child up like a prostitute and now only people who craved ugliness wanted her.”
I hope that’s not what McCammon thinks of “Boy’s Life.”
The murder mystery gives continuity to the book, but each of Cory’s experiences brings back memories of adolescence that should be richly appreciated by readers.
McCammon gives readers a way to reminisce over the universal experiences of youth. Your first bike. Camping out. Long summer days. Your first dog. “Boy’s Life” is a book with which readers should spend some time, savoring the memories of childhood.
