Blue World - Softcover

Robert McCammon

3.96

5,455 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9993578045 ISBN 13: 9789993578048

Publisher: Pocket Books, 1993

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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 changes the day that Debra Rocks enters 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.

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Review:

"We will travel, you and I, across a tortured land where hope struggles to grow like seed in a drought. In this land, a place with no boundaries, we'll run the freeways and back roads and we'll listen to the song of the wheels and peer into windows at lives that might be our own, if we lived in that land." So Robert McCammon introduces this superb collection of 13 stories, nominated for a 1990 Bram Stoker Award for Best Story Collection. The standouts are "Blue World" (a richly imagined novella about a priest facing temptation); "Nightcrawlers" (a World Fantasy Award-winner about a Vietnam vet in a roadside diner); "Night Calls the Green Falcon" (has-been fictional hero dons his old costume to fight real evil); "Yellowjacket Summer" (fateful stop for gas in backwoods Georgia); and "Pin" (dare you to read that one). All of the stories are excellent.

From the Inside Flap:

In this expanded edition of Robert McCammon's classic short story collection, you will encounter horrors and delights in equal measure, including:

-A man who awakens one morning to find a skeleton in bed where his wife had been the night before.

-A small-time thief who steals a makeup case, and learns a dead horror star's secret.

-A roadside diner, where a Vietnam veteran comes seeking shelter from the storm.

-A young man in prison, who finds beauty and hope on the wings of a yellow bird.

-Halloween in a very special residential area, where trick-or-treating is deadly serious.

-A red house on a street of gray houses, and a breath of sweet fire.

-The adventures of a has-been serial hero, who dons his old costume and goes in search of a serial killer.

-A priest obsessed by a porno star, and his realization that both of them are being stalked by a third shadow.

-An old woman who channels early, simpler times in a melancholy Bradburyesque future.

We will see worlds within worlds through the windows of these stories. We might even see the end of the world, and we might sit on a front porch for a while and sip a glass of gasoline on a hot December day.

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