Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

McCammon’s epic bestselling novel about a girl psychic struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust

Something flashes in nine-year-old Swan’s brain, telling her that trouble is coming. Maybe it’s her mother, fed up with her current boyfriend and ready to abandon their dismal trailer park and seek a new home. But something far worse is on the horizon. Death falls from the sky—nuclear bombs which annihilate American civilization. Though Swan survives the blast, this young psychic’s war is just beginning.

As the survivors try to make new lives in the wasteland, an evil army forms, intent on murdering all those tainted with the diseases brought by fallout. When Swan finds a mysterious amulet that could hold the key to humankind’s salvation, she draws the attention of a man more dangerous than any nuclear bomb. To rescue mankind, this little girl will have to grow up fast.

I've always thought that any kind of film based on a book or short story can be a fascinating experience for the author---not necessarily because the film is good or bad, but because it's a reflection of how other people visualize the author's words. A writer creates the word pictures, and then people who weren't directly involved in that creation process have the task of making the word pictures solid. But I think the real challenge of being a writer is to create a mental movie: doing the lighting, the costumes, the casting and makeup, the special effects, the directing and making sure all the props are there on cue. I hope the readers do approach my books as films, that they can see in their minds as they read. The devil, it's been said, is in the details. If the details aren't there, a scene often lacks vitality.

All books are like children. They develop their own personalities as they're written. Some of them are sweet and gentle, others are nasty bullies, some don't want to grow up, others jump ahead so fast they pull you along by the throat. This, strangely enough, has nothing to do with length or complexity. It just is. No book I've ever written has been born in quite the same way, though my work patterns don't vary. Swan Song was a relatively easy birth, in that it flowed smoothly from beginning to end. Stinger was a beast; about sixty pages from the end, I realized I'd made a major goof and had to go back two hundred pages and start from there again. Usher's Passing almost put me under, but Mystery Walk was easy. The Wolf's Hour was really fun to do, probably the easiest birth of all even though it went back and forth between time periods. But my latest book---called MINE---was much tougher, even though the story is simple and straight-ahead. So it's hard to tell what the child will be like until you get into the birthing process. You just have to grit your teeth, hope for the best, and prepare to face the detail devil again.

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