I understand what you mean. They Thirst is very different from a Boys Life in "voice". Wolfs Hour is also different. But i think that you can see a likeness in Speaks the NightBird to Boys Life when it comes to "voice". I have only read these four so far. I have Swan Song, Queen of Bedlam and Stinger waiting in the wings. But that is perhaps a bit to little to have read to really have an opinion? Either way i have enjoyed all of them. But Boys Life was just plain amazingly good.
So far, I've read 4 myself:
They Thirst,
Speaks the Nightbird,
Swan Song, and
Boy's Life, and I found all to be wildly different.
They Thirst was story driven--the characters hardly mattered, and I couldn't name a single one right now (though I remember the story well).
StN was language driven--it was all about the description and the dialogue. The story was rather slow, but the characters were finely drawn.
Swan Song was character driven; story development was secondary to character development. There were jumps in the narrative that were rather clunky, but the characters grew and changed believably, so it didn't matter.
Boy's Life was exceptionally well done, in that it drew all of the other threads together, and on top of that was very cleverly plotted to parallel the novel mentioned in the book. None had any author 'tags' in style or language. Very unusual, and it makes it seem like there is no single 'McCammon'--maybe a group of writers using one name. Not that I'm saying that happened (lol), but that's what it reads like
. In a way, it reminds me of Baz Luhrmann's 'Red Curtain Trilogy' of films:
Strictly Ballroom attempted to tell a story through dance,
Romeo & Juliet used a modern update of setting but Shakespeare's words to tell a story through language (cutting out 'background noise' that keeps modern viewers from understanding Shakespeare), and
Moulin Rouge told a story through song. McCammon is playing with the way he writes to do something similar. It's fascinating to me
