Boy's Life -- written at a 5th grade reading level
McCammon, Robert
While this novel is not to be confused with This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, it contains pervasively vulgar language and situations parents might want to be aware of before their minor children read this book.
From the editor’s summary: “Zephyr, Alabama has been an idyllic home for 11-year-old Cory Mackenson...a place where monsters swim in the belly of the river, and friends are forever. Then, on a cold spring morning in 1964, as Cory accompanies his father on his milk route, they see a car plunge into a lake...A desperate rescue attempt brings Cory’s father face to face with a vision that will haunt him: a murdered man, naked and beaten, handcuffed to the steering wheel, a copper wire knotted around his neck. As Cory struggles to understand the forces of good and evil at work in his hometown, from an ancient woman called the Lady who conjures snakes and hears the voices of the dead, to a violent clan of moonshiners, he realizes that not only his life but his father’s sanity may hang in the balance...”
This nearly 600-page novel combines Nazi war criminals, murder, a house of ill repute, moonshiners, white supremacists/the KKK/neo-Nazis, voodoo, a zombie dog, a possessed bicycle, a possessed hot-rod, physical/sexual abuse, a man who wanders the town stark naked (“his doodad and balls hung out in full view”), a plane that accidentally drops a bomb on a house in the town and a traveling circus with a mistreated “triceratops”/rhino. Cory also “sees” the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 in his dreams.
Language includes shithead, motherfucker, sonofabitch, fuckin, fucked, whore, suck cocks, sucking big fat donkey cocks, Nigger, squawboy, whorehouse, shitfire, niggerblood, niggernuts, asshole, chickenshit, Jesus, Goddamn, dickhead, little pussy.
• Hold still, you shithead!
• Where’s the money, you motherfucker?
• That sonofabitch don’t feel no pain! He’s got skin like fuckin’ armor plate!...I’ll throw you outta here on your ass!
• I’m all fucked up.
• Go suck a whore.
• (Drunk man to wife): Right fuckin’ here...you’re a goddamned liar...I don’t wanna come to bed, you fat-assed cow! (To his son): Hey Benny boy...you know what happened to you?...The best part of you stayed in that busted rubber, that’s what happened. (To Cory): You can tell that goddamned milkman daddy of yours to go straight to hell.
• (Easter church service): Place is packed as the whorehouse on payday, ain’t it?
• (About an 11-year-old girl): ...she told…the art teacher and her classmates that her pappy kept at the back of his closet a big stack of magazines that showed boy demons sticking their tails in the holes of girl demons...brought a dead cat to school in a shoebox with pennies tapes to its eyeballs for show-and-tell...opened up (another) shoebox...the sight of those 4 squirrel heads crawling with ants and their eyes poked out with a toothpick...
• (Bullying): He’s playin’ with his balls…Who the fuck is that?...you smell like shit…He’s got shit in his mouth!...I think he’s been suckin’ too many cocks...You been suckin’ too many cocks?...That right? You like to suck cocks?...He likes to suck big fat donkey cocks...Feed the baby, Gordo, Gotha said, and Gordo unzipped his blue jeans...Gordo, holding his exposed penis, stood over Nemo...Shut up niggerblood, if you don’t want some rain in your face, too...staggered away from Nemo just as his fountain arced. The urine wet the front of his jeans and ran down his legs...You bastards...
• ...can stick his head up his ass for all I care.
• Fuck that noise!...have you gone fuckin’ crazy?...You fellas look like sacks of shit...
• (11-year-old Cory spying on a naked 16-year-old girl): ..the small buds of her breasts visible...wore nothing to cover the area between her long, sleek thighs either...my eyes were spellbound.
• (Bullies): Four little pussies all in a row...(about a magazine picture): I can see her fuckin’ titties!...you shithole...Shut your hole, dickhead!...Little pussy..Little pussy queer...Pussy, pussy, pussy!
• We’re gonna go through you like shit through a goose!
• A man sat against a wall, a puddle of urine between his legs. Two young men came along, and one of them held a tin gasoline can…kicking at the man…gasoline sloshed over him. The other young man pulled a pack of matches from his pocket.
• (Prostitutes): A blond-haired angel (said) Motherfucker better do me right...Better fuckin’ score me, goddammit!
• A man...was standing over a woman sprawled in a doorway. He was zipping up his pants. The woman’s face was a pulped mass of black bruises. There you go, the man said. Showed you, didn’t I? Showed you who’s boss. He reached down and grabbed her hair. Say it, bitch! He shook her head. Say who’s boss! Her swollen eyes were pleading. Her mouth opened, showing broken teeth. You are, she said, and she began to cry. You’re the boss.
• A small white dog was searching desperately through garbage cans, its ribs showing. Suddenly a hulking man was there, and he...lifted a baseball bat and slammed it down across the dog’s back. The dog howled with pain and thrashed, its spine broken...The man stood over it, and he lifted the baseball bat and brought it down and then the dog had no more muzzle or eyes, just a smashed red ruin. The white legs kept kicking, as if trying to run. Little piece (of) shit, the man said, and he stomped the skinny ribs with his foot.
• ...a boy about my age...eyes glassy...picked up a sponge and a tube of glue, the kind my buddies and I put plastic models together with. He squeezed glue into the sponge and then he pressed the sponge over his nose and closed his eyes as he inhaled. After a minute he fell backward, his body starting to convulse. His mouth was open, and his teeth began to clamp down again and again on his tongue.
• Other language: Nigger, squawboy, whorehouse, shitfire, niggerblood, niggernuts, asshole, chickenshit, Jesus, Goddamn.
A professional review from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (printed on the back cover of the book): “Boy’s Life is a wonderful book. It recaptures the magic of being a child in a world of possibilities and promise. It is about being born ‘with whirlwinds, forest fires and comets inside us,’ and it reminds us of a magical time before the magic was ‘churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.’ Boy’s Life is for the boys—and girls—in all of us. ”