Robert R McCammon - Mine

Robert R McCammon - Mine

Grafton 1991

Every mother's nightmare - brought to screaming life...

OBSESSION...

Laura Clayborne is a successful journalist with a successful stockbroker husband. But her marriage is foundering and her biological clock is winding down. David, her newborn son, is the only light in her life.

Mary Terrell, alias Mary Terror, is a scarred survivor of the Sixties. A former member of the terrorist Storm Front Brigade, she now festers in a world of warped memories and unrelenting rage. Quite simply, Mary Terror is mad. Murderously mad.

...AND POSSESION

When Mary Terror steals Laura's baby and heads west, killing anyone in her way, Laura realises the only way to stop her is to hunt her down. But the closer she gets to Mary, the more she must think and act like her...

Mine is psychological terror of the highest order a novel of taut and unrelenting suspense set against te panoramic backdrop of a land of lethal violence.

Front cover illustration by Mike Timmins.

Grafton called it Fiction/Thriller. For all those of us who think of hippies as peace, light and lurve, man types, Mary Terror is a bit of a revelation. A member of Weather Underground offshoot the Storm Front, who took it to The Man with bombs and guns in the late '60s/early 70s, she escaped from a Symbionese Liberation Army style shootout with The Pigs, with terrible injuries, but managed to successfully stay under FBI radar despite being on their Most Wanted list . Thinking of herself as a soldier of liberation, she's held down a series of dead-end jobs and kept an interest in guns, LSD and The Doors, waiting for another chance to start the revolution. This comes via a cryptic message in Rolling Stone, which reactivates Mary's No Surrender warped 60s 'idealism' and leads to her kidnapping Laura's baby, as an offering to her former Storm Front leader, who's baby she was carrying when injured.
Although Laura flirted with hippiedom when at college, she took the breadhead route after, and lives in comfort. Things start to go wrong when she finds out her husband is being unfaithful, just when she's about to drop their first child.
As her world crashes around her after the birth, things get worse when Mary T takes the child. With the police and FBI failing to track down the kidnapper, Laura has to take the law into her own hands.

After this Prince And The Pauper beginning, the book takes off on a violent road trip. At 560 pages its very drawn out, suspenseful in parts, but the sheer scale of the journey, and the oft occuring showdowns hang it out something rotten. I stayed until the inevitably disappointing end, but there was a lot of enjoyable stuff along the trail.