The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing

Robert McCammon

Mar 2018 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Four chilling tales from the New York Times–bestselling author of Swan Song and the “true master of the Gothic novel” (Booklist).
 
From rural Alabama to the Louisiana bayou to the North Carolina mountains, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning author Robert R. McCammon has made the American South his own Gothic playground in these four unforgettable novels.
 
A Boy’s Life: “Strongly echoing the childhood-elegies of King and Bradbury, and every bit their equal,” McCammon’s World Fantasy and Bram Stoker Award–winning novel takes place in 1964 Alabama, where a twelve-year-old boy’s idyllic life takes an abrupt turn into a dark world of mystery when he and his father witness a car roll into a lake—only to discover a corpse handcuffed to the steering wheel (Kirkus Reviews).
 
“It’s McCammon’s The Prince of Tides. . . . Incredibly moving.” —Peter Straub
 
Mystery Walk: Two boys with mysterious powers—a psychic who speaks with the dead and a faith healer—share a common bond and hold mankind’s fate in their hands in an epic showdown of good versus evil.
 
“As finely a turned tale of horror as the best of them.” —Houston Chronicle
 
Gone South: A veteran’s moment of rage leads to a grisly murder and a heated chase deep into the bayou, where he encounters a pair of bizarre bounty hunters—and a strange new friend, who might help him find redemption.
 
“A gothic picaresque that mixes gritty plot and black comedy.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
Usher’s Passing: Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” is no fiction in this Gothic novel of ancestral madness in the mountains of modern-day North Carolina, as the heir to the Usher legacy—a horror novelist—confronts his terrifying inheritance.
 
“A frightening pleasure.” —St. Louis Dispatch

Ratings and reviews

Needs swan song

About the author

One of the founders of the Horror Writers Association, Robert McCammon (b. 1952) is one of the country’s most accomplished authors of modern horror and historical fiction. Raised by his grandparents in Birmingham, Alabama, McCammon published his first novel, the Revelations-inspired Baal, when he was only twenty-six. His writings continued in a supernatural vein throughout the 1980s, producing such bestselling titles as Swan Song, The Wolf’s Hour, and Stinger. 

In 1991 Boy’s Life won the World Fantasy Award for best novel. After his next novel, Gone South, McCammon took a break from writing to spend more time with his family. He did not publish another novel until 2002’s Speaks the Nightbird. Since then he has followed “fixer” Matthew Corbett in two sequels, The Queen of Bedlam and Mister Slaughter. His newest novel is The Five. McCammon and his family continue to live in Birmingham.