Mine by Robert McCammon

Early 1970’s. Symbionese Liberation Army. Weather Underground. Storm Front. Domestic terror groups are at war against ‘the man’. Bombs, murder, arson are their tools in an attempt to keep up the movement. The eight core members of the Storm Front are cornered in a NJ apartment building. The resulting firefight leaves four dead and numerous cops and FBI either dead or on medical disability. Lord Jack, Mary Terror (pregnant with Jack’s child), DeDe, and John escape and go to ground in separate directions. “Nobody cared much about the Movement anymore. It was a dry and dusty thing, like the air in the graves or Hendrix and Joplin and God.” Her God - Jim Morrison.

Late 80’s. Mary Terrell has been a fugitive, living mostly in squalor doing menial jobs. “The clock of the Age of Aquarius had turned, hippies and yippies had become preppies and yuppies. The Chicago 7 were old men. The Black Panthers’ had turned gray. The Grateful Dead were the darlings of MTV.” Mary’s working in a Burger King near Atlanta. She still mourns the death of the Storm Front and the movement . . . and her lost child. Years of drugs and no doubt some PTSD have taken their toll on Mary. She lives a fantasy in her shabby apartment with a doll. Make that dolls. When the baby cries on, Mary tips over the edge of sanity to teach her child a lesson, usually with fire, a knife, or the burner on the stove. She has a closet full of mutilated dolls.

On a foray for supplies, her paranoia forces her to duck behind a copy of Rolling Stone magazine (now just another tool of 'the mindfuck state'). She sees a personal ad calling for true believers to meet at the weeping lady on February 18 at 2pm. That was Lord Jack’s name for the Statue of Liberty. He’s calling on the remaining Strom Front to meet, to take up the fight again.

But the last time she saw Lord Jack, she was carrying his baby. He’ll want to know. Mary’s diseased mind works out a plan. Find the right hospital, case it out, dress like a nurse who is really “a six-foot time bomb ticking steadily toward explosion” and steal a newborn, a baby she “’can call mine,’ to give to Jack for them to raise and resurrect a new Storm Front.

The baby she steals belongs to Laura Clayborne. Affluent, nice house, cars, clothers, job. Even gets to review books for the Atlanta Constitution, like her current task, Burn This Book, by a hippie who has stayed loyal to his beliefs. Laura really has everything she needs, except a faithful husband who’s been in an affair for the last 4 months of her pregnancy. Screw Doug. She has her baby, David. that she ‘can call mine.’  But just like that, this big nurse snatches David.

The police, FBI, and national media are all over the kidnapping. They track back to Mary’s apartment and find the tortured dolls, and 3 dead bodies. National news. Mary Terror has resurfaced and the entire country is seeing Mary Terror’s face everywhere, including by one of the FBI agents she thought she’d killed back at the firefight.  Over the next week, she works her way to Jersey, to the Statue of Liberty.

What she finds in not Lord Jack. DeDe and John show up. And for different reasons.

Laura remembers the author of Burn This Book mentioned having met one of the surviving Storm Front, DeDe. So she and her stitches hauls up to Chattanooga to find out where DeDe might be. From these 3 directions – Mary/DeDe/John, Laura, and the disfigured FBI agent – all converge at DeDe’s small home outside Ann Arbor.

Jack’s alive. Living in northern California, near the old safe house where the Storm Front was born so long ago. Mary and the baby, Drummer, are tracked by Laura and DeDe (who wants to help save the baby, the hell with Mary, she’s nuts), and the FBI agent. Less a chase and more a journey to get to a known destination hopefully before Mary arrives.

I read this 1990 copyright a couple years after it was just published. I had picked up McCammon’s ‘Gone South’ on a lark and was intrigued. The library had ‘Mine’, so I picked it up. Couldn’t have been any more different from Gone South. A wacked out 60’s radical, a kidnapping, a silver spoon girl, and a cross-country chase. And throw in a high body count. A few months ago, the Kindle store had this for free (kudos to being on McCammon’s mailing list via his website) so I jumped at it.

While I remembered the gist of the story, I had forgotten just how far gone Mary Terror was. Or the single-minded obsession of Laura. Or Mary’s viciousness when her mind flipped.

In the late 90’s, director/writer Frank Darabont (screenplay and director for Shawshank, and The Green Mile) wrote a screenplay for Mine, but to date, no studio has picked it up. Which is crazy because we get hammered about the lack of leading roles for women. Ok, so it’s violent. But this is a book with women in all lead and supporting roles. What more do they want? I don’t get it.

I wouldn’t call this book of redemption ‘entertaining’ because of its dark subject matter. But, like all of McCammon’s books, it is highly readable and grabs you by the throat daring you to put it down. McCammon doesn't sit at the top of my power rotation for nothing. 

So, the Storm Front is dead. Today, it lives on as the pre and post game radio show for the Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL. What has life come to? 

ECD