Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Book News: Robert McCammon Ebooks

Open Road Media released nine (9!) of McCammon's books as ebooks yesterday. If you haven't read Robert McCammon or you simply haven't read them all, I can't recommend enough that you do so.



These are the Open House Media ebooks now available at Amazon, BN, Sony, Kobo, etc. These titles are also supposed to be available through Overdrive.com. I'm hoping that means you will be able to check them out through your local library, but I don't see them on there yet.

And yes, I'm a bit shocked by the covers. Mostly because they don't match the price tag, but they also don't do the stories any justice. These are pretty epic must reads.

The Wolf's Hour

On the eve of D-Day, a British secret agent with unique powers goes behind Nazi lines

Michael Gallatin is a British spy with a peculiar talent: the ability to transform himself into a wolf. Although his work in North Africa helped the Allies win the continent in the early days of World War II, he quit the service when a German spy shot his lover in her bed. Now, three years later, the army asks him to end his retirement and parachute into occupied Paris. A mysterious German plan called the Iron Fist threatens the D-Day invasion, and the Nazi in charge is the spy who betrayed Michael’s lover. The werewolf goes to France for king and country, hoping for a chance at bloody vengeance.



Mine

A mother fights to rescue her newborn from a six-foot-tall madwoman

No one knows Mary Terrell’s real name. She killed a man during the climax of the Summer of Love, and for two decades she has changed her name and location regularly, always keeping watch over her shoulder for the FBI. She has three passions: LSD, firearms, and children. She visits toy stores a few times a week, picking out a baby doll to take home and treat as a child. The new family always starts out happy, but when the baby refuses to eat, Mary gets angry. Murdered dolls fill her closet, and the woman who calls herself Mary Terror is tired of children made of plastic.

Laura Clayborne’s marriage gives her little joy, but she can’t wait for her son to come into the world. But if Mary Terror has her way, it won’t be long before he leaves it again.



Blue World

A novella and twelve stories from a master of supernatural horror

Father John has lived his whole life without knowing a woman’s touch. Hard at first, his self-denial grew easier over time, as he learned to master his urges with a regimen of prayer, cold showers, and jigsaw puzzles. That changed the day that Debra Rocks entered his confessional. A rough-talking adult film actress, she has come to ask him to pray for a murdered costar. Her cinnamon perfume infects Father John, and after she departs he becomes obsessed. Around the corner from his church is a neon-lit alley of sin. He goes there hoping to save her life before he damns himself.

That is “Blue World,” the novella that anchors this collection of chilling stories by Robert R. McCammon. Although monsters, demons, and murderers fill these pages, in McCammon’s world the most terrifying landscape of all is the barren wasteland of a lost man’s soul.



Swan Song

McCammon’s epic bestselling novel about a girl psychic struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust

Something flashes in nine-year-old Swan’s brain, telling her that trouble is coming. Maybe it’s her mother, fed up with her current boyfriend and ready to abandon their dismal trailer park and seek a new home. But something far worse is on the horizon. Death falls from the sky—nuclear bombs which annihilate American civilization. Though Swan survives the blast, this young psychic’s war is just beginning.

As the survivors try to make new lives in the wasteland, an evil army forms, intent on murdering all those tainted with the diseases brought by fallout. When Swan finds a mysterious amulet that could hold the key to humankind’s salvation, she draws the attention of a man more dangerous than any nuclear bomb. To rescue mankind, this little girl will have to grow up fast.



Mystery Walk

Two young psychics do battle with an ancient evil

Billy Creekmore was born to be a psychic. His mother, a Choctaw Indian schooled in her tribe’s ancient mysticism, understood that the barrier between life and death is permeable. She knew how to cross it, and used that knowledge to help the dead rest easier. She passed that power on to her son, and he has spent his whole life learning how to communicate with the dead to prevent them from meddling with the living.

Though his powers are the same, Wayne Falconer’s background could not be more different. The son of a prominent preacher, he would be disowned if his father learned he was using supernatural powers in service of the church. Though they don’t know each other, Billy and Wayne share a recurring dream—and a common enemy. When a nightmarish monster descends on their community in Alabama, mankind’s fate will rest in their hands.



Stinger

A UFO crash sends a small Texas town into uproar

The sun rises on Inferno and Bordertown: patches of civilization carved out of the tough Texas earth, watching each other and waiting to see which dies first. The copper mine is finished, and both towns—one for the whites and one for the Mexicans—are wasting away. Now a pair of mysterious visitors is about to make them shrink faster.

The black ball lands first. A small sphere, snapped off of an alien ship as it plummets through the atmosphere, it explodes onto Jessie Hammond’s truck. When Jessie’s daughter picks it up, the object possesses the young girl’s body and begins trying to communicate. As Jessie tries to rescue her daughter, something far more deadly sets down in the desert. An interstellar war has come to Texas, and Inferno is going to burn.



Gone South

A moment of madness forces a Vietnam veteran to run for his life

Two decades after he finished serving his country in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Dan Lambert still pays the price. As he hustles for construction work in the heat of a brutal Louisiana summer, Dan tries to ignore the pounding in his head—a constant reminder of the Agent Orange–caused leukemia which will soon end his life. And now the bank wants to repossess his truck. His attempt to reason with the loan officer does not get him far. Dan loses himself in rage, and for a moment is back in the jungle again. When he comes out of his bloodlust, he has shot the banker through the chest. There is nothing to do but run.

On his trail are two peculiar bounty hunters: a onetime Siamese twin and a heavyset Elvis impersonator. To save his own life, Dan is going to have to remember why it was worth living in the first place.



Boy's Life

In Zephyr, Alabama, a bizarre murder is only the beginning

Small town boys see weird sights, and Zephyr has provided Cory Jay Mackenson with his fair share of oddities. He knows the bootleggers who lurk in the dark places outside of town. On moonless nights, he’s heard spirits congregate in the churchyard to reminisce about the good old days. He’s seen rain that flooded Main Street and left it crawling with snakes. Cory knows magic, and relishes it as only a young boy can.

One frosty winter morning, he and his father watch a car jump the curb and sail into the fathomless town lake. His father dives into the icy water to rescue the driver, and finds a naked corpse handcuffed to the wheel. This chilling sight is only the start of the strangest period of Cory’s life, when the magic of his town will transform him into a man.



Usher's Passing

A struggling author must confront the dreadful secrets of his famous family’s past

Two men argue in the low light of one of nineteenth-century New York’s vilest bars. One is an aristocrat, clearly slumming, while the other, in appearance no better than the gutter-trash around him, is the finest author of his age. The wealthy man is Hudson Usher, come to berate Edgar Allen Poe for using Usher’s family history as fodder for his most famous story. The house of Usher has not fallen, Hudson boasts. It will endure into the centuries.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Usher line persists. The newest heir is Rix Usher, a hack horror writer whose ailing father has just called him back to the family’s North Carolina estate. To become the new Usher patriarch, Rix must confront a Gothic mystery more twisted than anything even Poe could have imagined.

4 comments:

  1. Awesome chick!!! Thanks for the heads up!

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  2. I really need to read more of his books, I absolutely loved The Five (which Stephen King got me to read this summer).

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  3. It *is* very cool. Also, the ebooks will be on OverDrive, they just haven't populated yet.

    Kate - stay tuned! I'm going to have lots of McCammon reviews and recommendations coming down the pipe. :)

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