 |
Robert R. McCammon
By
Richard Bleiler and Hunter Goatley (2002)
|
 |
Between 1978 and 1993 Robert McCammon published an even dozen novels and
one collection of short stories, almost all of which contained overtly
fantastic and horrific elements. This number is small indeed when
compared to the output of such contemporaries as Charles Grant, Stephen
King, and Dean Koontz, but it nonetheless distinguished McCammon as a
consistently gifted and able writer, albeit one whose early works showed
an occasional inability to create strong characters and who tended
occasionally to sentimentality. Nevertheless, because McCammon's
technique improved with each book, his later works—in particular
Boy's Life (1991) and Gone South (1993)—are
essentially unclassifiable, blending elements from forms and genres as
disparate as the bildungsroman, magical realism, southern gothic,
historical novel, and social commentary. In 1993, at what would appear
to be the peak of his skills, he retired from writing, citing variously
depression, exhaustion from overwork, a desire to spend more time with
his family, and frustration with publishers, who insisted he limit
himself to writing genre horror fiction when he wanted to explore other
literary forms. This self-imposed retreat concluded in 2002, when a
small press announced that it would be publishing Speaks the
Nightbird, a historical novel written in the early 1990s, but it
remains uncertain whether McCammon will ever resume writing.
Robert Rick McCammon was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 17 July 1952,
the son of Jack (a musician) and Barbara Bundy McCammon. The marriage
failed, and McCammon was raised by his grandparents in Birmingham. He
received a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Alabama in 1974,
and currently resides in Birmingham.
Despite this strong association with the
South, its history and traditions played little substantial role in his
early work. Nevertheless, paralleling his development as a writer has
been an apparent acceptance of his southern heritage, and the last two
novels he produced before his self-imposed hiatus—Boy's Life
and Gone South—are both set in the Deep South and make use of
its heritage and traditions. Furthermore, McCammon's works often
contain references and asides that cannot be fully appreciated unless
one is familiar with Birmingham. The vampire leader Count Vulkan of
They Thirst (1981), for example, was named for the cast iron
statue of Vulcan set on the Red Mountains on the Birmingham/Homewood
border.
Following graduation, McCammon wrote advertising copy for Birmingham
businesses and newspapers. Failing to get his short stories into print,
he wrote Baal (1978), an ambitious effort having as its basis the
biblical Book of Revelations and the ultimate conflict between limited
Good and limitless Evil. In the afterword to the 1988 edition of
Baal, McCammon stated that "Baal is about power, written
at a time when I had none," adding that "you always hear this said to
young writers, 'write about what you know.' I wanted to write about
things I didn't know, so I consciously set Baal in locations as
far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and
Greenland. I wanted a global scale and a story that would take the
reader to the very edge of Armageddon."
Baal begins in New York City, when Mary Kate Raines is raped by a
being that leaves burns where it touched her. She gives birth to a
child, Jeffrey Harper, which destroys the lives of the Raines. After
Mary Kate kills her husband, the boy is sent to an orphanage, where he
matures with uncommon rapidity, develops unpleasant powers, and prefers
to be called Baal. He flees the orphanage with his followers and,
ultimately, emerges in Kuwait. There he meets elderly theology
professor James Virga, who has left Boston to discover the whereabouts
and fate of his young colleague Donald Naughton, who went to Kuwait to
study Baal's sect. Virga rapidly realizes that though Baal is human in
shape, he is absolutely evil in intent and is determined to dominate and
destroy the world. Virga is powerless to stop Baal and would perish but
for the appearance of Michael, a laconic stranger with obvious powers of
his own. Michael and Virga follow Baal across the wastes of Greenland
and do battle with Baal, an epic confrontation that ends on a
deliberately ambiguous note. Baal and Michael have vanished, locked in
titanic and inconclusive struggle, and Virga is about to be rescued, but
are those rescuing him Baal's disciples?
McCammon's second published novel was actually his third novel. He had
followed Baal with The Night Boat (1980), but the
publisher decided that The Night Boat might be too similar to a
recently released motion picture called Shock Waves. McCammon
thus wrote Bethany's Sin (1980), after which the publisher
decided to publish The Night Boat. Upon acceptance of the
latter, McCammon decided to become a full-time writer.
Bethany's Sin had its genesis in a Birmingham building McCammon
used to pass on his way to work, "a rather forbidding-looking Gothic
house with a simple sign out front. That sign said: WOMEN'S CLUB.
Nothing else." From observation of this club came the novel, whose
premise involves a young couple moving to the small Pennsylvania town of
Bethany's Sin and gradually discovering it is a place with lethal
secrets and mysteries. In this case, these involve the rebirth of
Artemis, incarnate in the person of wealthy archaeologist Dr. Kathryn
Drago. She leads a cult of lethal axe-wielding Amazons who at night
ride about town killing townspeople as well as passing strangers.
Thematically somewhat uninspired, and with debts to Thomas Tryon's
Harvest Home (1973)—which likewise involves a lethal
matriarchal cult in a small town—Bethany's Sin is nevertheless
interesting for a barely submerged subtext involving a fear of women.
This is not to say that Bethany's Sin is a misogynistic work.
Rather, McCammon as novelist seemed to be grappling with the awareness
that women are frequently outsiders, have their own identities,
behaviors, and histories, and that sometimes these run contrary to the
accepted and believed norm.
The Night Boat (1980) merges McCammon's interests in
World War II and its ordinance with a horrific plot. Set on the small
Caribbean Island of Coquina, and focusing largely on the guilt-ridden
David Moore—an expatriate banker whose sailing accident left his wife
and child dead—it describes the horrors that emerge from a sunken
German U-Boat, mysteriously intact after more than 35 years of
submergence. The supernatural basis of the story involves a voodoo
priest cursing the U-Boat's crew to perpetual life in their submarine,
and they have become flesh-eating zombies. The supernatural story is
less interesting than is the account of the ultimate redemption of
Moore, and The Night Boat is slight, the least interesting of
McCammon's early novels.
McCammon followed the relatively disappointing The Night Boat
with They Thirst (1981), a cheerful and sprawling exercise in
grand guignol that sets classical vampires and their followers in
contemporary Los Angeles. Much of the story takes place in the literal
shadow of a ruined castle overlooking Hollywood: built by horror film
actor Orlon Kronsteen, it has remained empty following the discovery of
Kronsteen's tortured and decapitated body. The inhabitants of Los
Angeles—in particular police captain Andrew Palatazin, reporter Gayle
Clarke, a sociopathic killer known as the Roach, young Tommy Chandler,
actor Wes Richer and his psychic African girlfriend Solange—go about
their daily lives without realizing that Castle Kronsteen is now the
home of Count Conrad Vulkan, a 500 year old vampire, who is employing
the vicious albino motorcyclist Kobra to assist him in his raids on
humanity. (Kobra is also one of the people responsible for the death of
Kronsteen.) They Thirst in part becomes a struggle between
limited human good and seemingly limitless supernatural evil, with much
of the action occurring during a supernaturally generated sandstorm.
There are nevertheless numerous imaginative touches that make They
Thirst more than a thematic repetition of McCammon's earlier work.
First, Vulkan is shown to be but a weakling in comparison to his
diabolic mentor the Headmaster, and Vulkan's pride and arrogance are
ultimately the cause of his undoing. Next, They Thirst has a
thread of black humor running through it, and it is one of the first
novels to ask where an army of the undead would sleep: a significant
portion of the early novel involves Palatazin's attempting to discover
why corpses have been exhumed and their coffins stolen. Finally,
They Thirst shows that McCammon was capable of putting new twists
into established stories, and the novel's conclusion is not the defeat
of Vulkan but the conclusion of the horrors humans visit on each
other.
Mystery Walk (1983), McCammon's fourth novel, was the
first to be published in hardcover. It is a complex tale involving the
maturation of two young men, each possessing supernatural powers. Billy
Creekmore inherited his abilities from his Choctaw mother, and he uses
his powers to heal and set spirits to rest. Wayne Falconer has
essentially the same powers, but he uses his to raise money for his
father's fundamentalist Christian campaign. In addition to sharing
psychic abilities, each healer shares a recurrent dream involving an
eagle made from smoke battling a snake made of fire. The paths of the
two intersect several times, and ultimately they become allies, battling
a monstrous supernatural figure, the shape changer, that has directed
their lives for its own purposes.
Mystery Walk is ambitious and makes good use of
Native American folklore as well as showing the biases directed against
Native Americans. It is also the first of McCammon's works to make
direct use of the American South: Creekmore and Falconer are from
Alabama, and the scenes involving Alabama life and folkways are
well-presented and convincing. An additional autobiographical element is
present in the character of Creekmore, who is McCammon's age. Several
scenes in Mystery Walk were based on McCammon's experiences as a
child, including a tent revival, which was patterned after an actual
revival that McCammon's grandfather hosted on his farm.
Much of Usher's Passing (1984) is set in the south,
though in North Carolina rather than Alabama, and like its predecessor,
it convincingly blends folklore, local color, and literary history to
great effect. The premise of Usher's Passing is that Edgar Allan
Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" was a fictionalization of some
unfortunate events in the lives of the Ushers, and the story begins in
New York in 1847, when Hudson Usher, Roderick's brother, confronts a
drink-sodden Poe and informs him that he resents Poe's using his family
in his stories. Roderick leaves, believing Poe will be forgotten, and
the Usher family, already wealthy through its armament sales, grows even
wealthier. When the story switches to the present, the Usher fortune is
measured in billions, and Rix Usher is one of three Usher children
returning to the ancestral mansion to see who will inherit their dying
father's fortune.
Although Rix's discoveries and his maturation and acceptance of his heritage
form the heart of the novel, the surrounding events and numerous subplots are
also well described. Usherland, the estate, is dominated by the Lodge, a
sentient treasure house whose walls are distressingly mobile and whose
intentions are rarely friendly. Images of physical death and decay are
pervasive: a monstrous black panther—Greediguts—roams the grounds,
as does the child-stealing Pumpkin Man. A mysterious disease limited to the
family, Usher's Malady, affects the oldest Usher, immobilizing and destroying
his physical body while sharpening his senses to preternatural acuteness.
An intriguing linkage may be made between Rix and McCammon, whose middle
name ("Rick") is phonetically similar. Rix's history shares
much with McCammon's own life, including jobs writing ad copy and
working on the staff of a B. Dalton bookstore. McCammon was raised by
his grandparents, and, as with Rix, it was expected that McCammon would
be the kind of person his grandparents wanted him to be: that he would
go into the family furniture business and would continue to live in the
house his grandparents owned, keeping things as they always had been.
McCammon decided he had to live his life his own way, as did Rix.
McCammon followed Usher's Passing with Swan Song (1987),
his longest and most horrific novel to date. Like Stephen King's The
Stand (1978), its literary model, Swan Song follows the lives
and actions of a diverse group of characters in a post-holocaust world.
King used a super-flu to kill most of the world's population, but he
left buildings and civic infrastructure intact, and apart from the
emergent supernatural elements, most of the problems faced by his
characters are logistical: corpses must be removed, electricity must be
restarted, and civil order must be maintained. McCammon went several
steps further and destroyed his world with a limited nuclear war, and
his characters face plagues, devastation, radiation injuries and
sicknesses, declining food and fuel rations, nuclear winters, and of
course, each other.
The Swan of Swan Song is Susan Wanda (Swan), a girl with psychic
abilities. When the bombs strike, she is nine and accompanying her
mother through Kansas. She meets Josh Hutchins, an enormous
African-American wrestler living from paycheck to paycheck, and he
becomes her protector in the devastated wasteland. As Josh and Swan
travel from town to town, meeting occasional survivors, including the
viciously insane Alvin Mangrim, other survivors also travel, their paths
occasionally crossing: Sister Creep is a disturbed woman from
Manhattan; 13 year old Roland Croninger, a survivor of a survivalist
redoubt and a budding psychopath, is accompanied by the much decorated
Colonel Macklin, whose honors are empty and whose memories are haunted
by the Shadow Soldier, whose presence enabled him to stay alive at the
expense of others.
The fantastic elements in Swan Song emerge after the bombs strip
away civilization and reveal its underlying magic. Sister Creep finds a
circlet of glass embedded with jewels; it is psychically sensitive,
warns her of danger, and permits her to watch the slow progress of Josh
and Swan. This circlet is sought by a red-eyed being who wants to
destroy it, for with its destruction all beauty and hope will end. This
being—a shape-shifter who calls himself Friend and who is anything but
friendly—allies himself with Macklin and Croninger, who have survived
to establish a horrific force, the ironically named Army of Excellence,
whose purpose is to kill all who have any trace of disease caused by the
nuclear war. (Equally ironically, Macklin and Croninger are both
thoroughly diseased.)
Swan Song is perhaps McCammon's most controversial novel, though
the controversy is not so much over the subject matter as it is in the
novel's technique. Certainly the book is overlong and has some weakly
drawn characterizations and a weakly portrayed romance. At the same
time, it has an enormous number of characters whose actions are always
interesting, much convincing detail, and great strokes of imagination.
Furthermore, McCammon is able to depict something as mundane as the
passing of a horse with great conviction, and the positive far outweighs
the negative. Swan Song tied with Stephen King's Misery
for the 1988 Bram Stoker Award for outstanding achievement in horror and
dark fantasy and was the first of McCammon's books to be a New York
Times best-seller.
Stinger (1988) is science fiction, albeit with a dark
sensibility, that tells the tale of a small, dying town in Texas called
Inferno and how its inhabitants, at war with each other, react to the
arrival of an alien named Daufin -- and an alien bounty hunter called
Stinger, who is chasing Daufin. The book, which reads like a horror
movie from the 1950s, is over 500 pages long but the action occurs
during one 24-hour period. (Many readers were not aware of the time
span until they neared the end of the book and read about the sun rising
again.) Like its predecessor, Stinger sold nearly a million
copies and again made McCammon a New York Times best-seller.
Stinger was followed by The Wolf's Hour (1989), an odd
work featuring a werewolf as protagonist whose action occurs primarily
during World War II. Though werewolves are traditionally supernatural
beings, McCammon provides a rationale for their existence, and change
involves concentration, effort, and stress rather than a full moon.
Furthermore, McCammon's werewolves are guided by human consciousness
rather than bloodlust, and when Michael Gallatin—the protagonist—is
first introduced, it is as a wolf, attacking the Germans in North
Africa, demoralizing them and stealing their battle plans. He is later
recruited by the Allies to discover the meaning of the term Iron Fist, a
grueling quest that has him pursued by Nazis through occupied Europe and
Nazi Germany. The novel is well-researched and frequently horrific, and
it succeeds well in conveying McCammon's interest in World War II with
his fondness for James Bond novels. Nevertheless, the work suffers from
the same problems that beset all historical fiction: the outcome of the
past is not in question, so from the very first the reader knows that
the quest must have succeeded.
Mine (1990) also makes use of historical events, but its use of
the past is to reveal contemporary motivations. The novel has as its
premise the idea that the 1960s radical group the Weathermen spawned an
even more radical group, the Storm Front. The Storm Front was led by
Jack Gardiner, who preferred to be called Lord Jack, and just beneath
him in the hierarchy was the enormous and thoroughly psychotic Mary
Terrell, who enforced Jack's whims and was generally and aptly referred
to as Mary Terror. The group's end came in 1972, in a shootout with the
police and the FBI, but Mary Terror survived, and since then she has
held a string of low paying jobs, moved frequently, and become obsessed
with babies. (She was pregnant during the shootout but lost the
child.) Her path intersects with wealthy Atlanta suburbanite Laura
Clayborne, approximately the same age but whose life has moved in
relatively conventional circles, though she is haunted by nightmares.
Clayborne is heavily pregnant as the story starts and has just
discovered that her husband Doug is having an affair. She is thus on
her own when Mary, disguised as a nurse, steals her baby in order to
present it to Lord Jack.
The story of Mine is of course the pursuit of Mary Terrell, with
Clayborne and the FBI attempting to discover her whereabouts, and Mary
attempting to reunite the Storm Front and locate Lord Jack. Clayborne
locates the few surviving members of the Storm Front and interviews
them, and ultimately the paths of the two women cross, the climax
occurring in the old house in California in which the Storm Front used
to hold its meetings. During the course of the novel identities become
blurred and realigned: Mary has become more maternal, for she has cared
for and genuinely loves the baby, and Clayborne has lost her
conventionality and, in her quest for her stolen child, has become
obsessive and determined. Mine won the 1991 Bram Stoker award
for best novel.
Also in 1990 McCammon published Blue World, his only collection
of short stories to date. Most of the thirteen stories contain elements
of fantasy and horror, and they are some of McCammon's best work.
"Yellowjacket Summer" describes a young mother and her two
children stopping in a small Georgia town, only to discover that it is
ruled by a psychotic boy who can control yellowjackets. "He'll
Come Knocking at Your Door" is also set in the South and shows that
everything has a price; being unaware of the cost does not save one from
having to pay. "Makeup" involves a thief stealing the makeup
case that belonged to horror film star Orlon Kronsteen (of They
Thirst): he soon discovers that the makeup converts him into
genuine monsters. "Doom City," "I Scream Man," and
"Something Passed By" are thematically similar, nightmarish
descriptions of domestic situations. "Night Calls the Green
Falcon" pays homage to pulp magazines and the adventure serials of
the 1940s and 1950s and concludes that the contemporary world still has
room for masked crime-solving heroes. "Nightcrawlers"
features a drained and breaking Vietnam vet whose ability to project
hallucinations and desires leads to a foregone yet chilling conclusion.
"Makeup" and "Nightcrawlers" are the only works of
McCammon's to have been filmed. "Makeup" was adapted for the
TV show Darkroom in 1981, and "Nightcrawlers" appeared
in 1985 as an episode of "The Twilight Zone" directed by
William Friedkin. The "Makeup" adaptation starred Billy
Crystal and Brian Dennehy and was played more for laughs than horror,
while "Nightcrawlers" is generally regarded as one of, if not
the, best of the new "Twilight Zone" shows.
With Boy's Life (1991), McCammon not only accepted his southern
heritage but used it as the basis for the story. The novel begins in
1964, in the small Alabama town of Zephyr, and is narrated by 12
year-old Cory Mackenson. He states at the beginning that "we had a dark
queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a gunfighter who
saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a monster in
the river, and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the
road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We
had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We
had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm, and we had a dinosaur
loose on Merchants Street. It was a magic place." It is the last
sentence that gives some idea of the novel's complexity and depth, for
the volume recreates the essence of an imaginative childhood in the days
before widespread television. It is a time when magical events could
happen and when the impossible might reasonably occur.
Boy's Life is nevertheless substantially more than Mackenson's
sentimental recollections. The story itself begins and climaxes with
the events surrounding a brutal murder—the secret in the lake—and
during the course of the novel the old South also begins to die, its
customs vanishing and the survivors scrambling to stay alive. Mackenson
several times witnesses the passing of power: the horrible Blaylock
family is defeated in a battle reminiscent of the climactic gunfight in
High Noon; the bullying Gordo and Gotha Branlin are defeated when
the abused learn to fight back; and the worst aspects of the old
South—the white racists—are defeated by the best of the new South.
Mackenson witnesses the passing of a close friend and—on a more
charming note—a triceratops in a seedy carnival (brought back by
Professor Challenger of Doyle's The Lost World [1912]) realizes
it does not need to put up with abuse and escapes to take up residence
in a nearby lake and attack cars and buses if they pass too close to its
territory. In addition to acknowledging Doyle, McCammon pays homage to
dozens of his favorite writers and media figures, including Ray
Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Eudora Welty, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Boris
Karloff, Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, Gene Autry, and Roger Corman. The
book won the 1992 Bram Stoker Award and the 1992 World Fantasy Award for
best novel.
The last novel published before McCammon's long hiatus was Gone
South (1993), a book that is the diametric opposite of Boy's
Life. The prose in Boy's Life was rich, dense and evocative;
Gone South is spare, almost terse, as it recounts the actions of
a series of characters. The focus of the story is Dan Lambert, a
carpenter who has developed a brain tumor and leukemia from exposure to
Agent Orange in Vietnam. While requesting an extension on a loan, he
inadvertently shoots the bank's loan officer, and he goes South, a term
combining elements of running away, going insane, and being dead. While
on the road he meets a disfigured young woman, Arden Halliday, who tells
him of the Bright Girl, a beautiful, perpetually young woman who lives
in the Louisiana swamps: Arden believes the Bright Girl will heal her.
As Lambert is traveling and seeking salvation and redemption, two
grotesque bounty hunters trail him: Flint Murtaugh carries his blind,
mute, and retarded undeveloped twin Clint embedded in his abdomen, and
Cecil "Pelvis" Eisley, a fat Elvis Presley impersonator carries around
an asthmatic little bulldog named Mama. An ambiguously happy ending is
ultimately reached.
Though it is stylistically somewhat pallid in comparison to Boy's
Life, Gone South is nevertheless a success as a novel. It is
tempting to identify Lambert with McCammon and to see Lambert's quest as
a fictional expression of McCammon's need to find something in which to
believe and somebody to love, as well as an expression of a wish to live
his days in privacy while at the same time permitting his artistic side
to reach maturity. Had McCammon's career finished with Gone
South, it would be an apt conclusion.
After Gone South, McCammon took time off to be a
full-time father. When he resumed writing, he turned toward historical
fiction and began Speaks the Nightbird, set in the Carolina
Colony in 1699. The novel tells the story of Rachel, a woman accused of
witchcraft in the new and struggling town of Fount Royal, and the
magistrate's assistant, Matthew, who begins to doubt the validity of the
charges. Against the magistrate's wishes, Matthew begins investigating
the truths behind the eyewitness accounts of Rachel's unholy dealings
with the Devil and discovers that while there is Evil in Fount Royal, it
is more man-made than unholy. McCammon spent over a year doing research
for the book, including a trip to Williamsburg to study documents from
the time period.
After finishing Speaks the Nightbird, McCammon
encountered an editor who wanted to change the book from what it was to
what McCammon felt was more along the lines of a Harlequin romance
novel. After trying to work things out with the editor, McCammon found
that other publishers weren't interested, for the book wasn't what
they expected a "McCammon novel" to be. McCammon eventually pulled the
book from consideration and started work on The Village, a novel
set in WWII about a Russian theatrical troupe, whose job it was to
entertain the Russian troops with government-approved plays depicting
proper Russian views, that gets caught behind enemy lines in Germany.
Writing The Village was an arduous task for McCammon, as he found
himself "snakebit" after his editorial experience with Speaks the
Nightbird, and he began to fear the possibility of more rejections.
It should be noted that McCammon's career began with the publication of
his first novel. He had not really experienced rejection before in his
career, and he found himself getting depressed. He overcame the
depression, but it took him three years to finish The Village.
Upon completion of The Village, McCammon found that the
publishing industry had changed radically in his six years away from
it. Speaks the Nightbird and The Village were offered
to publishers, but they didn't believe that the American book-buying
public would be interested in historical novels from McCammon,
especially since one of the novels did not feature American characters.
During the year the books were available, McCammon found he enjoyed life
without worrying about deadlines and publisher demands, and in 1999, he
announced his retirement from publishing and began enjoying life with
his family, catching up on all the things he never had time to do while
he was writing.
Fortunately for McCammon's fans, an employee of River City Publishing,
a small publisher in Montgomery, AL, had heard McCammon read from
Speaks the Nightbird at a local college in the mid-1990s and
approached him about publishing the book. McCammon liked the idea, and
Speaks the Nightbird is set for publication in September 2002.
However, as of this writing, McCammon sees this as simply the
publication of a book and not a return to writing and publishing. It is
likely that The Village will never be published though, like the
endings of all of McCammon's novels, the future remains open, with
untold possibilities for what lies ahead.
This essay originally appeared in Supernatural Fiction Writers,
edited by Richard Bleiler and published by Scribner's in 2002. It is
reprinted here with the permission of the authors and the publisher.
|