RARA-AVIS: mccammon's gone south

From: Robison Michael R CNIN ( Robison_M@crane.navy.mil)
Date: 30 Apr 2002


Dick Lochte says: Just to show that no good idea hasn't already been explored, there's a very tough novel based on the Oz legend (Baum's, not HBO's) -- Robert McCammon's "Gone South," in which an Agent Orange-poisoned Vietnam vet, blamed for a murder not entirely his fault, runs from the cops into a Louisiana swamp. There he picks up an assortment of weird and damaged fellow travelers all seeking a mystical swamp witch who can possibly
"cure" them all. It's a terrific book from a writer who seems to have done the unthinkable -- stopped publishing while still hitting the bestseller lists.

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spoiler:

what!?! i never knew that! i read the book and loved it. especially when they ended up in the swamp. so dorothy was the girl with the "wine" scar? i'll be damned. and the supporting characters were great. and it was a beau- tifully poignant ending too. spectacular. i would have liked to read more of him, but he's mostly a horror writer. i think he hit it big with one called _a boy's life_, or something like that.

and speaking of oz, have you ever heard that it was an allegory for when the gold standard was a big issue in the states? i think the lion was spozed to be william jennings bryan, and of course you had the yellow brick road, and i can't recall the rest of the analogy, but everybody and everything fit somewhere. from what i read though, the allegory was not the original intent of the author. of course, barthes says "the author is dead", doesn't he? i read it on a web site. ;-)

miker
 

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