A review by burritapal_1
Mine by Robert R. McCammon

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Violence 'R Us

Mindfuck State: Mary Terror's term for The Establishment 

I've been reading this book called Mine by Robert McCammon. Features this absolutely loca woman, she has always liked to do LSD a lot. So that must be something to do with her being Loca. And she steals this baby from this poor lady whose husband is cheating on her, so she's really looking forward to having someone love her, aka the baby. the police can't really do anything cuz they can't find her. she was part of radical militant groups in the 60s so she knows a lot about how to take people down, do violence on them or she's just a really crazy chick. She's an agent of chaos, but the only problem I have with her character is that she has not been working out and keeping in shape for being this agent of Chaos. She was when she was young, but they did training, to be ready for this type of taking down people and violence. This woman has been working as an assistant day manager at a Burger King. When she's off work She lays around and does LSD and watches TV and tries to find men to fuck. So how is she supposed to be in shape to do the kind of actions she's doing in this book? Well, suspension of disbelief right?

So this mama, her name is Laura, she takes off across the country after her. She gets all kinds of cut up and beat up by this crazy lady and by dogs and car wrecks and you name it. There's so much violence in this book. But it's kind of fascinating. . .

"The Silver Cloud Inn, where travellers on I-80 west are directed because the winter storm has made the highway so icy and the blizzard so blinding, that the Highway Patrol has shut it down after a couple of fatalities. Mary Terror and her " Drummer" have been staying there the last few hours. The lobby of the hotel is full of cots and sleeping bags, as all the rooms are long ago booked up. Indeed, Laura and Didi have caught up with them, and come in the lobby themselves, not knowing that Mary and David are there. When they see them, all hell breaks out, because Mary pulls out her gun and starts shooting, the manager of the hotel brings out an ax, and throws it at her, and Lauren and DiDi come running at her. She escapes out into the cold, with only her bag, leaving her coat behind, and David zipped up into a man's parka. This scene is so unreal..

" amid the prehistoric Beasts, in the swamp of snow, Mary trudged on. She had left her gloves and the warm, fleece-lined coat behind. Drummer was zipped up in his parka, but the wind was tearing through her sweater. Her hair was white, her face tight with cold. Her thigh wound [from the dog attack at the lumber yard] had split open, and she could feel the hot rivulets of blood oozing down her leg and into her boot. The crust of her forearm wound [dog attack] had also opened again, the bandage wet and red drops falling from her fingertips. But the cold had chilled her fever and Frozen the beads of sweat on her face, and she felt that God [Mary's name for Jim Morrison of The Doors, who she often hallucinates] was somewhere very close, watching her with his lizard eyes. She was not afraid. She had lived through worse injuries, both of the body and the spirit, and she would live through this. Drummer's crying came to her, a high note tattered by the wind. She zipped up his face as best she could without smothering him, and she concentrated on keeping her balance because it seemed that all the world was in tumultuous motion. It seemed the dinosaurs were roaring - the cries of the doomed - and Mary lifted her head toward the Iron Sky and roared with them. 

But she had to keep going. Had to. Jack was waiting for her [the leader of their militant group, who impregnated her with a baby, who she lost by glass cuts to her abdomen, in a shootout with the Feds. She kidnapped David from the hospital with the fantasy of bringing "their" baby to Jack and the 3 of them would be together, young and golden, in California]. Ahead, at the end of the road. In sunny, warm california. Jack, with his face a blaze of Beauty and his hair more golden than the Sun."

" Lord Jack wanted a baby. A son. He had given her a baby, and she had lost the gift. If she did not go to Lord Jack with a baby, he would turn her away. That was the message of the dream. But there was a dangerous flaw here, like a crack in time. Jack's baby was dead. She had Squeezed the corpse out of her body in a gas station bathroom near baltimore, her stomach lacerated with glass and metal. She had wrapped the little mass of tissue in the swaddling clothes of paper towels and sailed it off into the current. It had been a boy. That's what Jack had hoped it would be. A boy, to carry his seed into the future. But how could she go to Jack with his son when his son was dead and washed away?" 

this is when she decides she's going to kidnap a baby.

At her Grungy apartment she has a next door neighbor named Shecklett, an old man who is sick and tired of her making noise when she's on her Acid Trips, screaming and whatnot. She needs money to go kidnap the baby and go on her ride across the country to find Lord Jack, so she grabs Shecklett going in his door and kills him, after she only finds $543 hidden in his drawers.

" Mary picked up a washrag from the sink and jammed it into Shecklett's mouth. He gasped and gagged, and then Mary leaned over his naked body. She thrust the knife into one side of Shecklett's throat, her Knuckles scraping the Sandpaper of his skin. Before Shecklett could fully realize what she was doing, Mary cut his throat from ear to ear with the serrated blade, and Crimson blood Fountained into the air. 

Shecklett tried to scream around the washrag. As the blood sprayed into the bathtub from his severed carotid artery, Shecklett grasped at his throat with his one hand and started to rise to his knees. Mary put her foot into the small of his back and jammed him down again. His body thrashed and writhed under Mary's strength, blood spewing into the tub as if released from a pulsing faucet. 'My name is Mary terrell,' she told him as he bled and died. 'soldier of the Storm Front. Freedom Fighter for those without rights in the Mindfuck State, and executioner of the state's pigs.' He was trying to get up again, his knowledge of death affording him a last surge of power. She had to Bear down hard on him, and his adrenaline flood ceased in a few seconds. He arrived at the bottom of the tub as if doing a breaststroke in his own gore.'Defender of the just. Protector of the weak. Crusher of the Mindfuck mentality, and keeper of the faith.' "

There was an FBI man that she shot in the throat and then in the face, in the big shootout in her Storm Front days, who she thought was dead. When he saw news footage of Mary's kidnapping and the murder of her neighbor, he sat up in his chair and paid attention.

" he reached over beside his chair. He picked up a cord with prongs on one end, the other end connected to a small black box with a speaker in it. He fit the prongs into a flesh-colored socket on his throat, and he held the Black Box in his right hand and clicked it on. There was a low humming noise.

'It's you, isn't it, Mary?' The metallic voice said through the speaker. The man's lips moved only a bit, but his throat convulsed with the words. 'it's you, mary. Mary, mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?'

he ran the tape back and watched it a third time, his excitement mounting. 

'with shotgun shells and walking hell and dead men all in a row,' he finished. 

He unplugged his throat socket to save the batteries. They were expensive, and he lived on a budget. There were tears in his eyes: the bright standing tears of great joy. He opened his mouth to laugh, and what came out was Heavy Metal thunder."

I don't know how that would happen without his speaker being plugged in, but this dude is going to join the chase for Mary terror, along with Laura and Didi.

Mary takes away her mother's wedding ring and pawns it to get money to run away with her baby, "Drummer," as she renames david.

"... on her feet was a new pair of brown boots. A Hispanic man at a pawn shop in Washington's combat zone had given her $2,500 for her mother's $7,000 ring, no questions asked. Since leaving her mother, Mary and Drummer had lived in a series of rooms that gave new meaning to the term 'roach motel.' One called morning at the Sleep-Rite Inn near Wilmington, Delaware, Mary had awakened to find roaches scurrying across Drummer's face. She had plucked them off, one by one, and crushed them between her fingers. At the next place they'd stayed, Mary had had a bad feeling about the swarthy woman at the front desk. She didn't like the way the woman had looked at Drummer, as if some light switch were just about to click on in the woman's crack-fried brain. Mary had stayed there less than 1 hour, then had gotten Drummer out and hit the road again. Places they stayed took cash and didn't ask for identification, and most of the time the clientele were whores and johns, dope heads and hustlers. At night Mary kept the chair against the door and her gun under her pillow, and she always made sure she knew the quickest way out."

The funniest part in this book, is when she finds Lord Jack, he of the golden hair and white robe, who is the middle aged man who, along with his wife, makes up family crescents and coats of arms. He doesn't want a thing to do with her, so she blasts him away.