Gone South, a novel by Robert McCammon

I had just finished finally reading The Stand all the way through for the first time when I decided that I was definitely in the mood for some post-apocalyptic literature. So I went to the Amazon site and found one of those reading lists they have there and located an interesting book by Robert McCammon named Swan Song. Several additional reviewers had given it a thumbs-up, so I headed out to Barnes and Noble to buy Swan Song. As seems to be the case lately, the book was not available in the store. However, there was a section of Robert McCammon’s books, and so I purchased Gone South. I read a few pages in the store while drinking our traditional Sunday afternoon Bookstore Coffee. Then, I came home and placed it on the book shelf as I returned to the more important thing of the day, my Fantasy Football Team and the NFL on television. However, recently, I retrieved it from its place on the bookshelf and read it. From its first sentence, “It was hell’s season, and the air smelled of burning children…” until its end, I was intrigued by the plot, the writing, and the macabre look at the world that I found both disconcerting and interesting. Gone South is a dark book with a protagonist who is a murderer with a terminal disease, a damsel in distress who has a birthmark that scars half her face, and a bounty hunter who has three arms. I must admit that the three-armed bounty hunter was a little hard to take since it almost failed the “way past probable test,” but in a really weird way he and it meshed into the story . I enjoyed Gone South.” I really don’t know why except that the writing is tight, and the word picture really vivid, with few wasted words. That makes a book enjoyable to me, even though I wasn’t looking to buy it when I did.

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