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Ogre Roshiq's entry -

THE GREEN FEATHER


Based on Robert McCammon's Boy's Life

McCammom's Boy's Life offers many things. It is, in part, a mystery, but there are also enough dark moments in the story to consider it a horror story as well. But more than that it is a magical and very beautiful universal tale about being a boy and growing up in our very common word surrounding of good & evil.

The year is 1964. On a cold spring morning before the sun, 12-year-old Cory Mackenson is accompanying his father on his milk delivery route. It's on this route that Cory begins to come of age, as he and his dad witness a shocking accident that at first starts sinking with a menacing mystery. Corey and his father are just rounding a bend in the road when a brown car veers in front of them and drops down into the lake. There is a man behind the wheel, and Saxon's Lake is bottomless, so without any hesitation Cory's father makes a desperate attempt to save the driver, but instead comes face-to-face with a vision that will haunt and torment him: a dead man handcuffed to the steering wheel, naked and savagely beaten, a copper wire knotted around his neck. The lake's depths claim the car and the corpse, but the murderer's work is unfinished as, from that moment, both Cory and his father begin searching for the truth.
Zephyr is a sleepy, comfortable small town of Alabama. It’s a peaceful, idyllic place where Cory lives with his parents and pals around with his best friends - Davy Ray Callan, Johnny Wilson, and Ben Sears. It's 1964 and life is perfect for the boys. But now, the murder of an unknown man who lies in the dark lake, his tortured soul crying out for justice causes Cory's life to explode into deepening puzzles.
Tom Mackenson has seen dead bodies before, but never anything like this and the memory of what he has seen haunts him from that moment on and the dead man invades Tom's dreams calling for him to "Come join me down in the dark." One of the hardest things for Tom to deal with is the fact that the killer must surely be a local person, because only a local would know that the lake was so deep. In fact, if Tom and Corey hadn't witnessed the car going into the lake, no one would ever have known anything about the murder. Another thing that haunts Tom is the sad fact that nobody knows even seems to know the identity of the dead man. Their world no longer seems so innocent: a vicious killer hides among apparently friendly neighbors.

While his father is risking his life in the lake, Cory glances over towards the woods and sees someone standing there watching and wearing a long, dark coat. Cory looks away for a moment and when he looks back the figure has gone. Cory does not tell anyone about what he has seen, but later, while his father is talking to the sheriff, he walks over to where he thought the figure had been standing, but can see no signs of anyone ever being there. When he gets home though, he finds something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. It is a single, green feather...which later leads him deeper into the mystery.

Over the following months, both Cory and his father struggle to understand how life has now changed. Cory tries to understand his father's struggles and the struggle between good and evil that he has been forced to realize is taking place in his quiet little town. His father struggles with the sudden, harsh, realization that life isn't nearly as perfect or safe as he once believed it to be. It is now a darker world and a world of change. If and how they can accept that change is a large part of the story.

As days pass, Cory is faced with The Lady, an ancient, mystical woman who can talk to dead people, practices voodoo, and can bewitch the living, a violent clan of moonshiners, bullies, and the fact that a girl he calls "The Demon" has developed a crush on him and intends to make him miserable if he doesn't pay attention to her.

Boy's life is written in the first person and as the story is narrated to the reader by Cory; so there will be time to time monologue from his character in the film also...for example, after that mystical, magical things starts happening in Zephyr, Cory puts it:
"We had a dark queen who was one hundred and six years old. We had a gunfighter who saved the life of Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral. We had a monster in the river and a secret in the lake. We had a ghost that haunted the road behind the wheel of a black dragster with flames on the hood. We had a Gabriel and a Lucifer, and a rebel that rose from the dead. We had an alien invader, a boy with a perfect arm and we had a dinosaur loose on Merchants Street."

Other, equally unsettling transmogrification occur: a friend's father becomes a shambling bully under the influence of moonshine, decent men metamorphose into Klan bigots and "responsible" adults flee when faced with danger for the first time. With the aid of unexpected allies, Cory faces hair-raising dangers as he seeks to find the secret of the dead man in the lake.
His quest to understand the forces of good and evil at work in his hometown leads him through a maze of dangers and fascinations: the vicious Blaycock clan, who defend their nefarious backwoods trades with the barrels of their guns; a secret assembly of men united by racial hatred; a one-hundred-six-year-old black woman named the Lady who conjures snakes and hears voices of the dead; a reptilian thing that swims in the belly of a river; and a bicycle with a golden eye.

As Cory searches for a killer, he learns more about the meaning of both life and death. A single green feather leads him deeper into the mystery, and soon he realizes not only his life, but the sanity of his father may hang in the balance. Events such as Cory's dad seeing the dead body, Cory's dream while sleeping on Davy Ray's grave, and finding out who the real killer is all result of Cory's quest. When Cory's dad first saw the dead body in the car and looked into the face of murder, it rocks Cory's whole view of his hometown, and that everything is not as perfect as it seems. The next event, when Cory falls asleep on Davy Ray's grave and dreams of all the evils in the world, is when Cory fully reaches loss of innocence. He sees how evil the real world is, and how different it is from Zephyr. He knows that what happened with the dead man is not as bad as it gets, no matter how malicious it seemed at the time. The last event, when Cory discovers that the kindhearted veterinarian Dr. Lezander is the killer, is when Cory begins the next stage for quest, the seeking.

Cory's story with its pervading sense of childhood innocence tempered and compromised by experience is as such that it transcends the horror genre despite the understated supernatural elements. The story provides some intense action, a murder mystery, a horrifying and dramatic flood description. It portrays the excitement, despite the ignorance, of youth. It also included the most amazing description of the feeling of having a new bike and riding it.
This is a story of growing up during a time when the entire world seemed to be changing. It is the story of wisdom, courage, and truth--the kind of truth that everyone must eventually face. It is a story of life and of death. And most importantly, it is a story about the magic of childhood.
The story is set in the early 1960s and makes observations about changes that were happening in America at that time with particular emphasis on the Civil Rights Movement--several of the characters are even connected to the Ku Klux Klan. This is an affecting tale of a young man growing out of childhood in a troubled place and time and that offering is universal.

TBC...