What I've always loved most about the early works of Robert R. McCammon--those books which first introduced me to him, back in the day--is their sheer ridiculous chutzpah, their gloriously overweening ambition. As McCammon himself notes, in the Afterword to Pocket Books' 1988 re-issue of his 1978 first novel, BAAL: "BAAL is about power, written at a time when I had none. I was twenty-five years old...and working in a department store in my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama...You always hear this said to young writers: 'Write what you know.' I wanted to write about things I didn't know, so I consciously set BAAL in locations as far from the South as possible: Boston, the Middle East, and Greenland." See also: McCammon's entire tour of research for THEY THIRST, his 1981 vampires-take-over-Hollywood opus, which consisted of him flying into L.A. for a couple of days, then going home and getting busy.

The result? Well, it's passion and imagination over accuracy, all the way...but in this case, accuracy obviously just wasn't meant to win.

Now granted, I haven't read a whole lot of later McCammon--ie, the stuff which comes after SWAN SONG, his 1987 version of THE STAND (and I call it that advisedly, since I think even his biggest fans would probably group McCammon in the "almost as good as Stephen King when he's really on his game" pile)--though I certainly liked the crazy alien back-story stuff in STINGER (1988), and the anti-Hippie hatefest aspects of MINE (1990). But nevertheless, the novel of his which has influenced me the most is probably his least-often reprinted...so much so, it isn't even listed in some of McCammon's various bibliographies! The name of this book, which he wrote in 1980--either before or after his equally forgotten haunted Nazi sub tale, NIGHT BOAT--is BETHANY'S SIN.

And what's BETHANY'S SIN about, you ask? What's the monster du livre involved--the deadly glowing-blue-eyed menace, the ancient Greek-talking scourge? What is it that haunts this tiny Southern town, leaving a trail of split heads, dead babies thrown on trash-heaps and legless neighbor dudes kept in covert sexual slavery--not to mention a veritable plethora of seared-off boobies--in its stallion-mounted wake?

...Amazons.

Yes. That's right: Amazons.

But really, I should probably let McCammon speak for himself on the subject--

"Do you believe the Amazons ever existed?" [Evan] asked the man. "Anywhere?"

Blackburn smiled again, but the smile wasn't reflected in his eyes. "If you want to believe, then yes, they did exist...Who knows? The only thing that endures is the legend--of wild, cunning female fighters who came out of the mists and returned to the mists. But imagine if you can, Mr. Reid, hearing across the plain of battle the long and fierce war cry that would freeze the marrow in your bones; in the distance you could see the dust boiling as their horses approached, and long before they reached your ranks, the skies would sizzle with arrows. Then it would be hand-to-hand combat, sword and spear against the bipennis, the Amazonian double-bladed battle-ax...And during the terrible din of bloodletting, their eyes would be wild and shining; their senses would sing with the stimulation and tumult of war, as necessary for them as breathing. There would be no end to the fighting until the last man had been beheaded or dragged back to camp to be multilated. That would be a horrifying way to die, Mr. Reid; and I thank God that, if the Amazons did live, our destinies never met." He raised his wineglass, drank, and returned it to the table.

Boy, is he in for a big surprise!

BETHANY'S SIN begins when Evan Reid, the ostensible hero of our tale, moves into the aforementioned oddly-named town, accompanied by his lovely wife, Kay, and cute little blonde daughter, Laurie. As it turns out, Evan is psychic, which eventually causes him to twig to the fact that when richest lady in town Dr Kathryn Drago came back from a 1965 archaeological expedition--to a Turkish site she claims was once Themiscyra, capital city of the long-defunct Amazon nation--she brought along not only a private museum's worth of Amazon artifacts but also a horde of pissed-off Amazon ghosts. These ghosts have since possessed almost all the women in town, turning them into man-hating killing machines...and now, it's Kay's turn.

It starts with Kay having someone else's dreams, which often go like this:

She had found herself in a strange and foreign place where the sun burned red and high and vultures spun in dark circles above a death-littered plain. Bodies were strewn in bloody heaps, and the trash of battle lay scattered about her feet...Here a black-bearded warrior begging for mercy, the blood oozing from a gash in his belly. And Kay found herself approaching the man, and as her shadow lengthened and fell across him, he looked at her with blind terror in his eyes and held up his hands before his face. She stood over him, watching.

And knew that she wanted to destroy him. To reach inside and wrench out his dripping intestines. To grind him beneath her boot.

Pretty soon, Kay's dreams progress to include her cutting this poor guy's head off, whirling it like a slingshot and throwing it so hard the skull cracks open on impact, "making the brains ooze out like brown jelly." Can archery lessons for Laurie, a forcible single mastectomy and a limbless Evan kept for breeding stock be far behind?

"Luckily", Evan has far less problems with the idea of an Amazon invasion from beyond the grave than most guys might, because Evan has...shall we say issues?...with chicks, in general. And I'm not talking your usual turn-of-the-decade bra-burning/consciousness-raising sessions/ERA-type male vs. female problems. No, Evan's issues date back to when he was tortured back in 'Nam by a gorgeous Viet Cong who let a venomous spider crawl all over Evan's junk, then poked it with bamboo splinters until it injected him with liquid poison, right in the nuts.

Needless to say, the experience seems to have left Evan with not only the un-PC guts to slap a bitch under pressure, but a deep internal drive to do it even under normal circumstances. So when it all boils down to Evan and Dr Drago/Penethsilea's unknown daughter (or whoever), it's like Chuck Norris vs. Wonder Woman, Sunday Sunday Sunday. All bets are off.

There's very little you'll take away from reading BETHANY'S SIN that counts as anything like an accurate portrait of Amazons--and I'm talking about the myths, let alone the reality; XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS, cartoonish as it was, at least took some of its cues from those exciting actual archaeological findings which leaked out of the former Scythia during the 1990s. But given that McCammon had none of those to work with, he does remarkably well at the very difficult task (believe me, I've tried it myself) of creating monsters who are both innately female and intensely scary. Which is why BETHANY'S SIN definitely deserves to be rescued from the literary limbo that it seems to have slipped into--crude, rough-hewn and often heinously misguided in its gender assumptions as it is, it contains enough raw Horror Renaissance power to reach almost anyone...penis-endowed, or otherwise.

After all, I really don't think I was its intended audience, especially at the tender age of twelve. Do you? And I definitely wasn't supposed to read it as a creepily enticing fantasy of ultimate negative female empowerment, either, rather than a pulpily terrifying story about what sort of bad shit can happen when God-given roles get flipped...the dreadful legacy of a cursed, foreign civilization seeping down into small-town America like tainted groundwater, mutating everything it touches, setting daughter against father, wife against husband, mother against son...

And yet. And yet.

Thanks a bunch, Robert R. Without you, I'd never have known what a scary, scary person I might grow up to be, especially if I really set my mind to it.

THE END