Dick Lochte says: Just to show that no good idea hasn't
already been explored, there's a very tough novel based on
the Oz legend (Baum's, not HBO's) -- Robert McCammon's "Gone
South," in which an Agent Orange-poisoned Vietnam vet, blamed
for a murder not entirely his fault, runs from the cops into
a Louisiana swamp. There he picks up an assortment of weird
and damaged fellow travelers all seeking a mystical swamp
witch who can possibly
"cure" them all. It's a terrific book from a writer who seems
to have done the unthinkable -- stopped publishing while
still hitting the bestseller lists.
**************************************************
spoiler:
what!?! i never knew that! i read the book and loved it.
especially when they ended up in the swamp. so dorothy was
the girl with the "wine" scar? i'll be damned. and the
supporting characters were great. and it was a beau- tifully
poignant ending too. spectacular. i would have liked to read
more of him, but he's mostly a horror writer. i think he hit
it big with one called _a boy's life_, or something like
that.
and speaking of oz, have you ever heard that it was an
allegory for when the gold standard was a big issue in the
states? i think the lion was spozed to be william jennings
bryan, and of course you had the yellow brick road, and i
can't recall the rest of the analogy, but everybody and
everything fit somewhere. from what i read though, the
allegory was not the original intent of the author. of
course, barthes says "the author is dead", doesn't he? i read
it on a web site. ;-)
miker
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