Swan Song

by Robert McCammon and Robert R. McCammon

Book Overview

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read. New York Times bestselling author Robert McCammon's prescient and astonishing vision of a post-apocalyptic United... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671741039
• ISBN13: 9780671741037
• Release Date: June 1987
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Length: 956 Pages
• Weight: 0.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 4.3" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Good condition?

The book smelled like an ashtray.

My favorite book by my favorite author

I read this book when I was a teenager and have read it twice since. Each time I could barely put it down. Much better then The Stand in my opinion

How Isn't This A Movie?!

Completely intoxicating! This book is so many things, I can see the characters, feel every emotion as I navigate myself in my mind through each set of eyes. I hate some of them, then pity them, I love some characters, and feel so deeply the pain in all the struggles, the joy and hope in every achievement made, and the need for the pages to turn faster as well as slow down, so i can absorb every moment in this journey. It would honestly be the BEST movie if handed to the right people. LOVE this. read it 2x now, and I'm gonna read it again, feels like I need to revisit the apocalyptic expedition called Swan song once again, I'll hopefully see another detail in the landscapes and facial features and atmosphere my imagination skipped the 1st 2 times.

One of the best books...

When I say down to read this book I literally didn't get up until it was done. So amazing

This book ,I love!!! It is my favorite, this is my 3rd copy and I'll never lend it out!! Never got t

This book..takes you a journey and each chapter you hate to leave,then you remember you need to find out the next thing!! It's the best adventure you'll take..exciting,can't wait ..can't put down..kind of book.

McCammon is the best!

Swans Song is probably my favorite, but Mr. McCammon can do no wrong in my eyes. He’s become my favorite author. My only complaint is he doesn’t write fast enough and I can’t wait for his next book!

Brought me out of my multiple year rut of not reading

I can't even explain how amazing this book is! I dont think I've read like this since I was a teen and it feels good to just crunch a book again. The characters are so vivid. Good and bad you just fall in love with them. The details are amazing and the story is so well written you dont want to put it down!

Could not put this book down...

This book was amazing. There were characters you could love, and ones you definitely could hate. I felt the battle between good and evil could inspire hope. It may have also inspired me to think about a little doomsday prepping =)

Top 5 books!!!!

I picked this book up on a whim. Someone told me it read like Steven King's The Stand. I could not put this book down! I read it years ago and I still think about it. Don't hesitate, buy it.

I read this book in the 80's and it became my fav I've read it many times. I recently bought a paper

Love this book, it just ended to soon. Mine by Robert is good I'm reading it right now. Hard to put down like Swan Song.

One of my all time favorites

Excellent story!

One of Only a Handful of Truly Great Books

I read this many years ago when it came out. It still remains one of my five choices for truly great books. It is a very long book which is exactly what I love, but it captures you right in the beginning and doesn't let you go until the end. The characters are fleshed out really well and the story keeps you wanting more as you read. Swan Song is one of those few novels that remains in your memory forever.

One of the greatest Horror Novels ever written

It Hard to put into words how good this book really is. Swan Song stands as one of the greatest horror novels ever written in my opinion. It is over 950 pages long but you will find yourself tearing through them. The story was very intriguing, and it sucks you in. I would sit hours at a time caught up in this story. I would read till my eyes dried out and started hurting. There wasn't a character in this story that I wasn't wrapped up in. They all seemed so real to me. There wasn't one wooden character in this book in my opinion. They all had a realness to them that some in other books don't have. I HIGHY recommend Swan Song to anyone who loved The Stand, or any Horror fan for that matter. It is trip to a terrifying world that I can promise you will never forget.

Mr. McCammon's Opus

The apocalyptic genre is an endearing phenomenon in fiction. Even after the collapse of the Cold War, authors are still pumping out new novels about the end of civilization. That's probably due to the fact that nuclear war isn't the only way to kill off the human race; Stephen King got a lot of mileage out of a killer virus in "The Stand." This book, by the excellent storyteller Robert McCammon, resembles King's classic novel in several respects, but McCammon sticks with the classic nuclear annihilation scenario in "Swan Song," a book written as the Cold War was winding down in the late 1980's."Swan Song" starts out on a bleak note, and quickly goes down hill from there. The world is in turmoil as terrorists use nuclear bombs with impunity, the U.S. and the USSR constantly engage in skirmishes around the world, and the economy does a nosedive straight into the ground. Inevitably, the bombs are launched and the world erupts in a thousand mushroom clouds. This is all within the first hundred pages or so. What follows is the real story, and McCammon pulls out all the stops introducing us to the characters that drive the story.Just like McCammon's novel "Stinger," there are many major characters in "Swan Song." McCammon introduces us to Sister Creep, a New York bag lady fostering a horrific personal tragedy; Josh, a 7' black wrestler (known as Black Frankenstein) with a heart of gold; Colonel "Jimbo" Macklin, a former war hero with an ominous shadow dogging his every move; and Roland Croninger, a wise beyond his years child who grows into Macklin's sadistic acolyte.This is post-apocalypse, so there is the unavoidable good vs. evil theme running through the book. The good is Swan, a young girl who has the power to renew earth's ecosystem. The bad is the man with the scarlet eye, a shape shifter who makes King's Randall Flag look like the Osmond family. The other characters revolve around these two figures as the grand finale of the novel nears. McCammon has the ability to make his characters endearing and genuine. There are no cardboard cutouts in this book. Even tertiary characters are developed with loving care. It's relatively easy to draw evil characters because evil is easy to see. What is difficult is to craft characters on the other side of the moral coin, and McCammon does it with seeming ease. You learn to really care about these people, something that doesn't happen often in books of this genre.The atmosphere in "Swan Song" is bleak and oppressive. McCammon has no qualms about presenting life in a post-nuclear world. Cruelty is presented as normal behavior, and characters are mutilated or killed off quite frequently. Warlords battle for control of the country while little villages try to recreate a sense of community. The endless description of a shattered world slowly instills in the reader a sense of despair. McCammon's vivid portrait of a world gone mad certainly resurrects images of the Cold War and its shrieking insanity, when the world

A Great Novel!

Written in the mid-eighties, the book describes in chilling detail the nightmare of the times, i.e., nuclear holocaust. Some of the background events may be a bit outdated, but in light of the recent terrorist attacks we know there is still the threat of mass destruction. So my point is that the book is still pretty darn scary! The first couple of hundred pages that describe the nuclear attack and immediate aftermath are terrifying. The horrors that are described throughout the book are gruesome. America has become a scorched and barren landscape. The survivors miraculously scratch out an existence and somehow keep alive the hope of a future in which the sun will shine again and the land will bear fruit again. Ultimately, the story is about the struggle between good and evil, and how the stress of tragic events brings out the best in some and the worst in others. For a book of over 900 pages, it is a surprisingly fast read, and there are no lulls. McCammon is a superb storyteller who has created memorable characters and a detailed setting. Swan Song is a great book that I think ranks along side The Stand, which for years has stood as my favorite horror novel.

Yet another 5 star rating, and enough about the stand!

My aunt lent me this book and I figured it sounded a lot like the Stand, which at the time was my favorite novel. I read Swan Song every night for a week and a half. It was way better then the stand, and wasn't anything like it aside from the 'end of the world' scenario and an evil rising to threaten the survivors, so I'm not even going to compare the two books. The characters in Swan Song are so richly developped that you begin to feel for them. It's almost like you want to protect Swan just as much as the characters do. The last hundred pages or so are simply outstanding. It was so suspenseful that I could hardly sit still, and when it was over, I wished there was more to it then its 956 pages. The ending is what got me the most. There couldn't have been a more fitting end to this amazing story. I enjoyed everything about this book. It never gets boring, it doesn't have seven hundred characters in it all doing different things (like another novel i already said i wouldn't compare it to), but instead three main groups. The symbolism is just amazing, and the underlying themes and story is incredible. I can't say enough about it, so read it for yourself.