What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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ABANDONED. Father/son driving through Appalachia in the 1950s encounter magic. Fantasy, Horror. Spoilers ahead.
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Patrick (OP) was last active on the site in March 2020.
It’s about and Father and (early teenaged?) son driving through Appalachia in the 1950s. The father, a former army colonel, is going to visit a friend, a former army sergeant major, with whom he served in WW2. The Sergeant Major lives deep in the mountains with his American Indian wife, who I think might be some kind of a good witch. Somewhere in the story’s setting, the boy encounters a beautiful girl — and begins a nascent sexual relationship. It’s ultimately revealed that the girl was actually a fish who had been transformed into a human.
Specific details I can recall:
• The father explains to the son that a “sergeant major is the highest enlisted rank in the military.”
• The father and son discuss having seen a movie in one of the towns on their journey. The movie is a 1950s sci-fi schlock piece about giant locusts/grasshoppers. The son comments on the physical impossibility of giant locusts/grasshoppers — something about their limbs breaking from gravity(?)
I would categorize the book as having elements of coming of age, mystery, sci-fi fantasy, and horror.
Although I remember it as reading like YA/NA, there were two very sexual scenes in the book I can recall:
• The sergeant major encounters his wife in the bath and tells her not to “wash away all the good smell.” He then performs oral sex on her and the author comments “where she didn’t mind the bristles of his beard.”
• The other is alluded-to manual-genital stimulation scene between the boy and the girl/fish (“and she pulled …”)
Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!