The month of spooktober has passed, but autumn, the season of death, still surrounds us. So today I bring you reviews of the books I read this October. For the past several years this has been a tradition of mine, reading a bunch of spooky books around this time of year, though I’ve only made a post reviewing them all once. Hopefully from this year forward, that can be part of the tradition too.

Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon — Boy’s Life is narrated by Cory Mackenson, a middle-aged writer looking back on a pivotal year of his life growing up in the small town of Zephyr, Alabama. The book is divided into four main parts, each corresponding with a season, starting in spring and ending in winter. The year in question is the year Cory turns 12, and the year he and his father stumble upon a murder victim drowned in Saxon’s Lake, an old flooded quarry. That murder, and the mystery of the victim’s identity, let alone the killer’s, is the main throughline of the novel.

However, this book is over 600 pages, and it is not 600 pages of Encyclopedia Brown working one case. Instead, the book is composed of episodic chapters detailing various different adventures in Zephyr. Sometimes these chapters reveal a little more about the murder mystery, but usually they don’t. They often don’t even relate to one another, and they vary greatly in terms of tone and genre. One chapter is about a new kid in town who turns out to be a baseball prodigy; another is a monkey’s paw-esque story about the death of the family dog; another finds Cory abducted by a member of a moonshining clan. These chapters don’t really connect or build up to a larger narrative arc, aside from the arc of Cory growing up. Characters enter and exit like stage actors. They arrive, they play their part to a tee, and then they leave. Even Cory’s main group of friends really only shows up when they’re a central part of the chapter, but otherwise they have no involvement with the murder mystery or any other misadventures.

Because each chapter is so totally committed to its trope or theme or genre, McCammon never holds back. He gets to the good stuff right away, every time. The lake monster isn’t going to come back later, so the first chapter where it appears doesn’t waste time with just a little ripple in the water, or a half-glimpsed fin, no—the lake monster makes a full appearance and attacks Cory! Lots of the chapters feel like B-movies that have been fast-forwarded right to the climax. So instead of a tightly woven story where each thing leads to the next, you get a multigenre smorgasbord of all killer no filler one-off adventures. It’s a trade-off which I was happy to accept.

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