Death before dawn

My home town was probably a lot like yours. It was a place full of magic. And I’m going to tell you a story about it… In 1964, long before he became a successful writer, Cory Jay Mackenson was just an ordinary twelve-year-old boy, and the small town of Zephyr in southern Alabama was his whole world. The son of the local milkman, raised under the watchful eye of his ever-worried mother, he grew into a bright boy with a vivid imagination, a love for writing stories, and a few good friends with whom he shared the everyday adventures of boyhood. But then, one day, he and his father witness a tragic event that sows uncertainty and fear into the hearts and minds of Zephyr's residents. At the bottom of a nearby lake lies a car, and behind the wheel is the naked body of an unknown murdered man, handcuffed, with a tattoo of a winged skull on his shoulder. The police are baffled, but from that day on, Cory has no shortage of strange, even terrifying, experiences. A ghostly figure in a long dark coat and a hat appears to him, he fights a dramatic battle with a dreaded river monster during a flood, and he's invited to the home of the mysterious Lady, the leader of the local black community, who is said to wield supernatural powers. And according to her, something disturbing is happening in the land of the living and the world of the dead… This novel by one of the leading authors of modern horror, which won the Bram Stoker Award, tells of the clash between childhood innocence and evil and dark secrets. In this evocatively told story from a small American town in the 1960s, there is no shortage of magic, madness, fantasy, or the often harsh and cruel reality… “I won’t be getting this book out of my head any time soon.” – from reader reviews on Databazeknih.cz “A novel and a half, a brilliantly described account of a boy on the cusp of adolescence. With all the troubles and experiences that come with that age. And a hefty dose of imagination.” – from reader reviews on Databazeknih.cz “Boy’s Life is a text full of beautiful and terrifying images. McCammon shows a masterful sense of when to reach for a kind of Southern magical realism and when, on the contrary, to stick to a realistic line.” – Boris Hokr, ČT art “It went in the water!” I shouted. Dad stopped, pulled the handbrake, and jumped out into the tall grass by the side of the road. By the time I’d climbed out of the cab, he was already running towards the lake. He stopped on that sandstone cliff, where I finally caught up with him. The wind whipped and swirled around us, and in the faint pinkish light, we could see the car rocking in the water, huge bubbles rolling to the surface around the boot. “Hello!” Dad shouted, his hands cupped around his mouth. “Get out!” Everyone knew Saxon’s Lake was as deep as sin. Once that car sank into the inky depths, no one would ever pull it out. “Hello, get out!” The person behind the wheel didn’t respond. “I think he’s been knocked out!” Dad told me and started taking off his shoes. The car was slowly tilting to the passenger side, and a terrible wail came from it, probably caused by the water rushing inside. Dad asked me to step back a bit, and when I did, he jumped into the lake. He was a strong swimmer. With a few powerful strokes, he reached the car and found the driver’s side window open. He could feel a whirlpool forming around his legs, which would soon pull everything down into the impenetrable depths. “Get out!” he shouted again, but the driver just sat there motionless. Dad grabbed the door, reached inside, and gripped the man’s shoulder. The man wasn't even wearing a shirt. The body was pale and cold, sending goosebumps up Dad’s arms. The driver’s head tilted back, revealing an open mouth. He had short-cropped blond hair, his eyes were sealed shut with black bruises, and his face was swollen and disfigured from a savage beating. A copper wire, like a piano string, was tightened around his neck, so tightly it was cutting into the flesh. “Oh my God,” Dad whispered. The car swayed and hissed. The head fell back onto the chest, as if the driver was praying. The water had already risen above his bare knees. Dad realised the man was completely naked, sitting in the car as God made him. Then something glinted on the steering wheel, and he made out the handcuffs that secured the man’s right wrist to it. Dad was thirty-four. He’d seen a few dead bodies in his life. Hodge Klemson, one of his best friends, had drowned in the Tecumseh River at fifteen, and they found the body after three days, bloated and covered in yellow mud; it looked like some ancient mummy, they said. He had seen what was left of Walter and Jeanine Traynor when their Buick had a head-on collision with a logging truck six years ago, driven by a young lad who was on drugs. He had seen the dark, shiny mass that remained of Shorty Stevie Cauley after the firefighters had smothered the flames of the crumpled black dragster called Midnight Mona. So he had looked into that terrifying grimace of death several times, and each time he had taken it like a man – but this time was different. This time, it smelled of murder. – excerpt from the book