t is early 1964 in the small town of Zephyr, Ala. As an 11-year-old boy named Cory Mackenson accompanies his milkman father on his daily rounds, man and boy see a runaway car crash into a bottomless lake. Dad dives in to save the driver and, before running out of air and returning to the surface, sees that the man has been murdered and handcuffed to the steering wheel.
Over the next few months, as Cory sees his dad deteriorate beneath the weight of ruinous nightmares, he dedicates himself to solving the mystery so he can restore his dad's peace of mind. But that's not all he has to deal with in Zephyr, a small town with more than its share of terror and magic. Some of the dangers are entirely human: a family of local gangsters, for instance. Others are reflections of the changes then overtaking American society: the local controversy about the alleged satanic influence of a new musical group known as the Beach Boys. Others are just plain sad, like the heartbreaking explanation for the peculiar madness that leads the son of the town's richest man to walk around in public totally naked.
But there's also darker and more wondrous magic: a river plays host to a giant reptilian monster the locals call Old Mose. A ghostly hot rod drag-races along the highway. A triceratops breaks away from a traveling carnival and head-butts passing automobiles. Cory himself acquires a sentient bicycle named Rocket, which helps him win a memorable encounter with local bullies. There are also ghosts, witches, a living-dead dog, a replay of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and an encounter with reasonable facsimiles of the Mummy, the Wolfman and the Frankenstein monster.
Throughout, Cory continues to piece together the mystery of the murdered man in the lake. He knows the killer is one of his neighbors. But will he find the killer before the killer finds him?
Triumph of a career cut too short
The genius of Boy's Life lies in the way it captures such moments of youthful transcendence. The murder mystery at its core is, like the depredations of Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer, just the barest excuse for a plot; the book lays it aside for long sections presenting a wealth of chapters and incidents that, printed in excerpt, function as world-class short stories.
Incidents along the way range from the aftermath of a showing of Invaders from Mars, which leads to Cory's discovery that not all parents are as nice as his own ... to a gentle horror story that results when Cory refuses to let death take his beloved but ailing dog. The murder mystery in the background is conventional stuff by comparison—it's there, and it works to provide Cory with a purpose, but the grand achievement of this book lies in the wealth of invention that surrounds it. The rich characterizations, the finely wrought detail and the fantastic elements that seem to confront the boy on a daily basis all work together to produce a novel with enough wonders to fill 20 lesser books.
Robert R. McCammon began his career as a popular horror novelist whose books echoed Stephen King's. His best works in that line included a wild B-movie alien invasion novel called Stinger, an epic end-of-the-world yarn called Swan's Song and a World War II novel called The Wolf's Hour, distinguished by a secret-agent hero who also happens to be a werewolf. They're all violent, and they're all effective pulpy reads. But Boy's Life was a quantum leap forward for him. With that book, he entered Ray Bradbury country and conquered it. For reasons of his own, he wrote only one more novel—the fun and eccentric Gone South—before falling silent. He has since officially declared his retirement from writing. But Boy's Life would have been enough to cement any author's reputation.
