Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon
Boy’s Life is nominally a mystery story but mainly it’s the story of a boy, about 12, growing up in a small town in the 60s. I found the small-town, real-life portrait interesting. The characters were nicely drawn and the boy had just the right amount of innocence without being all Rugrats.
On the other hand, the mystery was lackadaisical and the occasional mystical injections were jarring. Here’s this almost hyper-real portrayal of small town life interrupted occasionally by supernatural monsters and or high speed car chases. Then the author wraps it up with a character who wrote a nice story about small town life but who was forced by his publishers to add a mystery into it. How meta.