buy the ebookAmazonAppleB&NGoogleKoboOverDriveSonyshare Mine by Robert R. McCammon Book details Making of... A mother fights to rescue her newborn from a six-foot-tall madwoman No one knows Mary Terrell’s real name. She killed a man during the climax of the Summer of Love, and for two decades she has changed her name and location regularly, always keeping watch over her shoulder for the FBI. She has three passions: LSD, firearms, and children. She visits toy stores a few times a week, picking out a baby doll to take home and treat as a child. The new family always starts out happy, but when the baby refuses to eat, Mary gets angry. Murdered dolls fill her closet, and the woman who calls herself Mary Terror is tired of children made of plastic. Laura Clayborne’s marriage gives her little joy, but she can’t wait for her son to come into the world. But if Mary Terror has her way, it won’t be long before he leaves it again. Dear Readers: I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to my next novel, MINE, which will be published in hardcover by Pocket Books in May. I sat down to write a ghost story. When I finished, I'd written MINE. Not exactly what I'd started out to do, and certainly not a ghost story in the traditional sense, but a ghost story all the same. MINE is the story of a past era, and a walking dead woman haunted by the specters of what used to be. Mary Terror, a woman lost in time, yearns for the days of radical militancy and the underground presses, an era of black-light posters, roach clips, strawberry incense and psychedelic dreams. She remembers like the touch of an old lover the violence of those times---the clashes with "the pigs" on college campuses, the Weather Underground's bombings, the rage of the Black Panthers, the cold calculations of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Her own angry band of brothers and sisters---the Storm Front---is long gone, destroyed by the police in a shootout in 1972 that also took the life of her unborn child. Mary Terror escaped the inferno, and she's lived alone, on the run from the murders of her past, since 1972. She talks to God in her room, and listens to his commands at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute. She waits like a coiled-up snake, an arsenal of guns around her, and she sniffs the air for the bitter, hated scent of pigs. Mary Terror is insane. Mary Terror is deadly. And Mary Terror wants a baby. What happened to those children of the sixties who learned the language of hatred, who swore oaths upon their bloodstained manifestos and vowed to never surrender? What happened to those soul survivors, when the clock of hours ran out on their day and the night came on fast and brutal and lonely? What happened to them, when the world stopped watching? Most of them changed. Took off their bell-bottoms and cut their hair and merged into the stream that leads always into the future. Most of them married, had families, and now fret about rap music and their kids getting into drugs. Most of them went on. But Mary Terror, with blood on her hands and darkness in her heart, has a different destination. Back into the twisted maze of the past, back into the domain of bombs and guns and highways heading toward a dream of glory across a haunted land. Mary Terror is going to go back, in a search to recapture her youth and the days of the Storm Front, the best days of her life. And this time she's going with a baby in her arms. Even if the child is not her own. So, a ghost story? Yes, I think MINE is. The ghosts of a time and place. The ghosts of what used to be, whispering from the yellowed pages of a Rolling Stone. Mary Terror's journey, into that land where the past and present meet in a violent and inexorable collision, is about to begin. Robert R. McCammon Copyright © 1990 by Robert R. McCammon. This letter originally appeared in the Pocket Books paperback edition of Blue World, first printed in April 1990. Reprinted with permission of the author.