Swan Song

Swan Song was published in 1987 and won the Bram Stoker Award that year, sharing the award with Stephen King's Misery. Robert R. McCammon had already written a series of horror novels set in the American south, and this book moved him into a much larger landscape: a nuclear winter, a cast spread across the continent, and a structure that follows several groups of survivors over a period of years rather than weeks.

The novel belongs to the run of post-apocalyptic fiction that followed the cold-war nuclear fears of the early 1980s, and it is the American counterpart to the British novels of that period. McCammon builds the collapse in stages: the exchange, the immediate aftermath, the winter, the settlements that form and the warlords who take them over. Against that he sets the supernatural strand, in which a being who calls itself the Man with the Scarlet Eye is travelling the same ruins looking for the girl whose gift can undo the damage.

McCammon writes in long chapters and with a large cast, and the book has stayed in print for decades as one of the reference points for the genre. He later moved away from horror towards historical fiction and thrillers, and he has spoken about the difficulty of following a novel of this scale. It is the book most often recommended to a reader who wants the epic version of the American apocalypse story.

The length is the point. McCammon gives the survivors jobs, camps and quarrels, so the ruined country becomes a place with a routine rather than a backdrop, and the supernatural strand has somewhere real to land.