For those of you that missed the episode of The Twilight Zone in which “Nightcrawlers” aired, run! don’t walk to your nearest bookstore and read this story. Stories like “Yellowjacket Summer,” a cross between King’s fog from “The Mist” and that Twilight Zone classic “It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby, in which a town is held captive by a lone boy and thousands of stinging insects the life affirming “Yellachile’s Cage,” a heartfelt story about prison life and hope and “The Red House,” a story of escape from the small town–literally and figuratively. Luckily, for those interested in dipping their toes into the McCammon river there’s a book that just fits the bill: Blue World, a short story collection including “Nightcrawlers” (which was filmed for the revival of The Twilight Zone), “He’ll Come Knocking at Your Door,” “Night Calls the Green Falcon,” the title novella and nine others. McCammon’s novels are daunting, though, large and epic, what my buddy Tad Williams would term “Winnebagos of a book” (of course, that’s the pot calling the kettle black). The publisher is hoping that it will appeal to the same people who make Thomas Harris a rich man. (There are some who say he’s rewritten Stephen King and done it better.) His new novel just hit the stands as I write this called Mine, it has no outlandish or fantastic events, just good old aberrant human psychology. A veritable writing machine, with bestsellers like They Thirst, Night Boat, Stinger, and Swan Song, the man has virtually rewritten the horror genre from whole cloth. If you read horror, you’d have to have been in suspended animation not to have heard of Robert McCammon.
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