The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was Robert McCammon's post-apocalyptic epic Swan Song. Published in 1987, nine years after Stephen King's The Stand, the story follows two bands of survivors -- one representing good, the other evil -- as they make their way across what used to be America while a supernatural being no less than Old Scratch himself seeks to undermine the good souls and shift the battle onto the side of evil. Yes, kids, eeriely similar to The Stand. More on that later.The tale begins on July 16 with the President of the United States, a former astronaut, facing a world in crisis. Eight months ago, the Soviet Union unleashed nuclear and chemical strikes on Afghanistan. A twelve-and-a-half kiloton nuclear device has leveled half of Beirut, with dozens of terrorist groups claiming responsibility. India and Pakistan have exchanged nuclear and chemical strikes, and Iraq and Iran follow suit. American and Soviet naval and air forces shadow each other over the Persian Gulf, while off Key West, a trigger happy U.S. fighter jet sends a missile into a crippled Russian sub. The U.S.S.R. responds by blinding American satellites. The President is adamant that he will not start World War III but his advisers remark that the world is already at war. In a game of brinkmanship, he reluctantly gives the A-OK to intercept Soviet submarines on the seas ...Meanwhile, several Americans go about the last day of their rest of their lives:-- In Manhattan, bag lady Sister Creep, whose regular life ended with drunk driving and its aftermath, opens up a razorblade on two men who assault her. Sister uses her last bit of change to enter the subway, where she seeks shelter in a tunnel, plagued by bad memories of what sent her here in the first place.-- In Concordia, Kansas, professional wrestler "Black Frankenstein", alias Josh Hutchins, resorts to some stagecraft when his opponent injures himself and risks allowing the bad guy to win the bout. Unlike his character, Josh is one of the good guys, with a wife and two sons in Mobile and a love for donuts.-- In Wichita, Sue Wanda Prescott tends to a garden she's planted outside the mobile home she shares with her stripper mom Darleen and "uncle". Swan, who has a gift for growing things and seeing into people, unnerves her mom's latest boyfriend, and after he slaps Darleen, mother and daughter hit the road.-- In Idaho, the Croninger family wind their RV up Blue Dome Mountain, where they're bought a two-week time share in Earth House, an underground compound managed by Vietnam veteran Colonel James Macklin. The young Roland Croninger, a geek for computers and strategy games, is not impressed with the middle-aged war hero, while his mother observes numerous drainage problems in the mountain fortress.These are the unlucky ones who survive the global thermonuclear war that begins at 10:16 a.m. EST.Sister Creep emerges from the subway to find her favorite spot in the city -- a glassworks shop -- destroyed along with all the other buildings. Amid the ruins, she discovers a ring of glass forged by the nuclear fire into a priceless jewel which seems to enable the bearer to "dreamwalk" great distances and see fantastic things. The ring gives hope to each of the shellshocked survivors Sister reluctantly gathers up to lead through the flooding Holland Tunnel to safety. Josh meets Swan & Doreen at a gas station near a cornfield in Kansas where the locusts seem to sense something headed their way. Swan feels it next but is unable to alert the grownups before missile silos in the cornfield open and fire ICBMs into the atmosphere. In the retaliatory strike that follows, Josh, Swan & Doreen are buried in a fallout shelter under the gas station.Colonel Macklin and the staff of Earth House track World War III in real time and seal the mountain as they've drilled for countless times. Located far from any likely targets, they watch in disbelief as a U.S. missile headed for Russia malfunctions and explodes close enough to hit the compound with a shockwave. The faulty drainage system turns the mountain in a tomb, separating Roland from his parents. The boy loses his mind but finds a new patron in Colonel Macklin, whom he rescues from the rubble and helps escape to the surface.In New Jersey, Sister Creep encounters a survivor who gives the name of Doyle Halland and claims to be a priest. Something about the man and the way he appeared suddenly makes Sister uneasy. He becomes fixated on the ring she's carrying after seeing the effect it has on other survivors. Halland reveals himself to be something less than human and far worse, a creature of many different faces and names (The Man With the Scarlet Eye among them) who's taken a front row seat to every genocide in history. Sister manages to escape and using the ring, begins to experience visions of a special girl in Kansas.This takes us through page 267 of 956 or roughly one third of the book. By the conclusion, I kept hoping it would never end.In Stephen King's anthology Four Past Midnight, the story The Library Policeman features an exchange between librarian Mrs. Lortz and a realtor named Sam Peebles, who feels the librarian's borrowing instructions to the kids seem harsh. She replies, "Their favorite novel was a paperback original called Swan Song. It's a horror novel by a man named Robert McCammon. We can't keep it in stock, Sam. They read each new copy to rags in weeks. I had a copy put in Vinabind, but of course, it was stolen. By one of the bad children." If that's not an endorsement from Uncle Stevie, I don't know what is. I first read Swan Song in high school and revisiting this 25 years later, am happy to say that I was even more enthralled the second time around. Once I quit comparing it to The Stand, which I read recently for the first time and still had very fresh on my mind, and simply submitted to McCammon's fits of imagination and gift of majestic storytelling, I never looked back.With The Stand, King's characters all seemed to me like they could be found in the same hardware store in Maine, and while King knows those characters, their pasts and their personalities extremely well, McCammon jets the reader out of the hardware store and scatters us to four corners of the country, introducing characters I found much more diverse and almost as compelling.The Man with the Scarlet Eye, alias Doyle Halland, alias Friend, is as close as I've seen an author get to using "Sympathy For the Devil" by The Rolling Stones to bring a character to life. He's introduced in a sleazy theater in Times Square watching Faces of Death III, laughing at the carnage, looking for himself on screen and giving the employees the creeps. Strangely, none of the staff members can agree on what the man looks like, and are reminded of painful memories while in proximity to him. Spook Central.One aspect of Swan Song I found wonderfully novel was the introduction of a skin condition among some of the survivors that becomes known as Job's Mask, which starts off as facial warts that begin to connect through tendrils and eventually wrap the sufferer's entire face in a thick mask. Those afflicted suffer great pain over many months and years as their facial structure itself begins to be altered ... altered into what becomes one of the great questions in the book.My only complaint about Swan Song is one that I reserve for every paperback I've picked up with McCammon's name on the cover and that's how awful the art is. Granted, McCammon's output in the '80s and '90s trafficked in demons, aliens and werewolves, but these covers look like something a demon, alien or werewolf coughed up. Any illustrator with a love for these novels could do a certifiably better job of capturing the majesty and scope of the storytelling. When reading a McCammon book in public, I actually turn the cover over so nobody will see what I'm reading. That's how bad this artwork is.Swan Song is not for the faint of heart, but what I found most remarkable about it is the lengths McCammon goes to render the country barren and why. The United States is cloaked in nuclear winter. The earth and bodies of water have been polluted. Rats are a good meal and for water, melted snow, which often makes those forced to sip it ill. At night, wolves come out of the woods to feed and later, things that no carnival freakshow could conjure up. Sunlight has vanished and along with it, hope. What happens when the characters finally come together in Missouri and begin to build a community -- where previously there were only survivors waiting for neighbors to die so they could steal clothes or food -- is I was watching them like a kid would some string beans he'd planted. I was invested emotionally in the transformation of the wasteland into something resembling a home and when it comes under attack, I was hooked into seeing it protected. I haven't come this close to talking to a book in some time.
5 starsWell, after decades in my queue,I finally did it, I read Swan Song, the massive classic post-apocalyptic tale from Robert McCammon. This is one incredible journey and adventure for us to share with a bunch of wonderfully realized fictional characters. McCammon does not hold back from laying blame for the destruction of the world on us, on our society, on the time periods Cold-War. He passes judgment on people, on cultures, and on countries as a whole, and taken in context, it added to the overall devastation and destruction. Swan Song is a very long novel, but not once during the read did I feel it. I was never bored, never looking for an ending, and I was immersed in their world every time I powered on my Kindle.This is not a zombie book! It is however a book about immense loss, about a world undone, and about a race that is on the border of extinction…“Around her were the crushed hulks of cars, taxis and trucks, some of them melted together to form strange sculptures of metal. The tires on some of the vehicles were still smoking, while others had dissolved into black puddles. Gaping fissures had burst open in the pavement, some of them five and six feet wide; through many of the cracks came gouts of steam or water like gushing geysers. She looked around, dazed and uncomprehending, her eyes slitted against the gritty wind. In some places the earth had collapsed, and in others there were mountains of rubble, miniature Everests of metal, stone and glass. Between them the wind shrieked and turned, spun and rose around the fragments of buildings, many of which had been shaken apart right to their steel skeletons, which in turn were warped and bent like licorice sticks. Curtains of dense smoke from burning buildings and heaps of debris flapped before the rushing wind, and lightning streaked to earth from the black heart of roiling, immense clouds. She couldn’t see the sun, couldn’t even tell where it lay in the turbulent sky. She looked for the Empire State Building, but there were no more skyscrapers; all the buildings she could see had been sheared off, though she couldn’t tell if the Empire State was still standing or not because of the smoke and dust. It was not Manhattan anymore, but a ravaged junkyard of rubble mountains and smoke-filled ravines.”Like most other McCammon novels this book shines by showcasing its wonderful protagonists, and spot lighting just how bad our antagonists can be. The characters have wonderful names. The names of the towns visited and featured all seem to signify something more. There is a great deal that is mentioned by McCammon’s writing by not putting it into written word at all. Symbolism, deep meaning, and heavy subjects are strewn through this novel. The characters even come out and talk about such things:““It made me think about sand,” Sister told him. “That sand is about the most worthless stuff in the world, yet look what sand can become in the right hands.” She ran her fingers over the velvet surface of the glass. “Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful,” she said. “It just takes the right touch. But seeing this beautiful thing, and holding it in my hands, made me think I wasn’t so worthless, either. It made me want to get up off my ass and live. I used to be crazy, but after I found this thing… I wasn’t so crazy anymore. Maybe part of me’s still crazy, I don’t know; but I want to believe that all the beauty in the world isn’t dead yet. I want to believe that beauty can be saved.””Even though a great deal of controversial topics are featured and even made into a focus, they are never done in a “down your throat” type of manner. Religion, the Cold War, Race, Class, Sex, and more are all made objects of this story but never really overdone. McCammon walked quite a few fine lines adeptly and never left us feeling offended or put out. His characters all followed the straight line where the good guys were really good, and the bad guys really bad. My only real disappointment in character development was that I felt that I was given more backstory and personality traits of our antagonist Macklin, then we were our wonderful giant hero in Josh(Black Frankenstein).The magic in this book is done with a subtle touch and never left me feeling like saying “Oh come on!” Swan and Sister had equal roles with magic and I loved the way that it slowly unfolded throughout this long story.“Was Mr. Moody right?” Swan asked.“Right about what?”“He said that if I could wake up one tree, I could start orchards and crop fields growing again. He said… I’ve got the power of life inside me. Was he right?”Josh didn’t answer. He recalled something else Sly Moody had said: “Mister, that Swan could wake the whole land up again!”“I was always good at growing plants and flowers,” Swan continued. “When I wanted a sick plant to get better, I worked the dirt with my hands, and more often than not the brown leaves fell off and grew back green. But I’ve never tried to heal a tree before. I mean… it was one thing to grow a garden, but trees take care of themselves.” She angled her head so she could see Josh. “What if I could grow the orchards and crops back again? What if Mr. Moody was right, and there’s something in me that could wake things up and start them growing?””Many reviewers over the years have written about the parallels of Swan Song and Stephen King’s The Stand, although I agree with many of them, I will not go into them here. I will however mention that this book made me think about my long adventure of The Circle Trilogy by Ted Dekker. Sure, Black, Red, and White are not your traditional post-apocalyptic books, but they are damn close to being them. The huge common thread is the spiritual one, the religious one, and the meaning of being human. It is done so much more gently in the Swan Song than in aforementioned trilogy, but to me, it is equally important and thematic. Many parts of this book moved me. I will never forget the scene when Swan comes off the front porch to be reunited with Josh. I loved Macklin’s internal dialogue and his conversations with the shadow soldier. Sister has a huge and unforgettable personality. Let us all never forget that Nuclear Missiles are bad, and apples and corn are good.On final note, I did hate the final chapters of this novel. A disgustingly morose story, and deadly journey in this adult oriented work, should never have had such a perfect fairy tale ending, complete with the words “Once Upon a Time.”
What do You think about Swan Song (1987)?
Warning: there may have been wine involved (imbibed)during the writing of this review.First off, there are a ton of 80’s references in this book that I loved. I grew up in the 80’s, and it just grabbed me. None of these were out right specific, but I felt them.•tNukes! Fear them every day•tRussians are BAD. •tThe movie Red Dawn•tMad Max•tKmart•tNukes!•tTerminator•tOf course I must mention King’s The StandI loved this book! I put off reading it for a while because I hold The Stand so dear to my heart, and yet I stumbled upon it in a used books store about a while ago, and I thought “Hey! Now I have to read it!” It stayed on my book shelf for almost another year. Why? I don’t know!This book is excellent. For those that love a good “the world is over dammit”, than this one is for you.I loved Josh, Swan, Artie, Sister, and Paul.Summary: The Russians nuke us. The world is OVER. Of course there are survivors. Some for whatever reason are not affected by the radiation. The survivors are just trying to do just that—survive, and find other people. I don’t want to give away any plot. I just want to share my favorite parts, so… I suppose that this may just contain spoilers.The scene in the Kmart was SO awesome. My heart was beating so hard for Josh. It reminded me of some of the Mad Max movies.The descriptions of the radiation poisoning on the people after seven years… was gross yet interesting. Especially since they are described as looking like people with giant gourds where their faces should be. Being Halloween time as I write this review, I have a few gourds on my porch and it creeped me a little to see them and reminded me of this book.The evil in this book is creepy, but doesn’t hold up to King’s Walking Dude.I highly recommend this book for all that love a good apocalyptic story!!
—Miss Kim
I read this book back when it was first published in the ‘80’s. I was still in high school, had big frizzy hair, wore too much blue eyeliner and pretty much hated my life. I spent most of my free time haunting the local Osco drug for the newest horror paperbacks to escape it all. When I saw this huge tome (900+ pages) I scurried back home with it thinking I had just hit the jackpot. And I had. It turned out to be one of the best horror novels I’d ever read and I was reading a lot back then. This is why I was hesitant to revisit it, some 26 years later, afraid I’d tarnish my memory of fiction perfection. But I did it anyway. I can’t read 900 page tomes anymore because my brain shuts down at the thought but I can read them on unabridged audio. Swan Song became my driving companion for over three weeks and now that I’m finished I already miss the soothing voice of Tom Stechschulte. I’ll have to snap up something else he’s narrated. Maybe “The Road” if I can bring myself to listen to it.If you’ve read this you already know it’s one of the best end of the world novels ever written, if you haven’t read it yet and you’re a fan of the new apocalypse books flooding the shelves, you really need to do yourself a favor and read this one. It is set in the 80’s and we are at war with Russia, trigger fingers set off nuclear bombs and kaboom the world as we know it is gone. The rest of the book focuses on a cast of characters as they make their way in this entirely new world void of all creature comforts like fresh water, sunshine, and warmth. But out of the destruction, a little magic blooms too. Two camps basically evolve. There are the murdering, raping pillagers and the decent people who want to restore the earth and rebuild. The two have an epic, classic collision of good vs. evil. Those are the bare bones of the story but it’s so much more than that. It’s heartbreaking and full of loss as well as hope and it so worth your time.A few notes that you should be aware of before digging in:1.tThe book doesn’t start with a huge bang. There’s enough setup and character back story here for 3 or 4 modern day books. Woo hoo for me because I can never get enough of that stuff (when it’s good) but maybe not for everyone?2.tThe action takes a little bit to get going but once it starts there is a lot of it and it’s described in vivid detail. I’m not a huge action fan and I admit I did doze off when the military maneuvers went on (and on). 3.tThe book skips around from group to group. There are a lot of characters to wrap your head around and I was a little confused here and there but eventually you get to know most of them very intimately. Many of them are flawed people and they’re all changed by their time on the road. I think I enjoyed that aspect most of all. Be warned though, some of these people who you will grow to love will die and you will probably cry. Maybe for a few days.4.tThis sucker is a 34 hour listen. I thought the narrator did a fantastic job with most of the characters. For the most part, he gave them distinctive voices with the exception of the villains at the very end (to me they all sounded the same screeching out their scratchy-voiced commands). You may want to find a sample online and give it a listen before committing. 34 hours is a long freaking time if the narrator isn’t working for you.5.tThere’s a hell of a lot of violence and it’s not the prettified, glossy kind. Be prepared.6.tThere is a strong, 50ish female character as a lead. Where can you find that nowadays? If you find one , tell me so I can buy it.7.tThere is even a little smidge of a sweet romance amidst all of the chaos. See, there’s something for everyone! Now go read it.
—Bark's Book Nonsense
Here's the bottom line: Swan Song is one of my favorite books of all time. It stills impacts me every bit as much as the first time I read it.Swan Song is very dark, and it's scary, but it's also one of the most beautiful and hopeful books I have ever read.Weighing in at 956 pages, it's a huge story in every sense of the word. There are characters you will hate and fear as well as characters you will fall in love with and care about long after you've finished reading. There is magic, evil, goodness, hope, ruin, and beauty throughout the pages of Swan Song.If you are a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, Swan Song is an absolute must read. I give it my highest recommendation.
—Jennifer
