July 31

July 31 is the hinge on which the entire siege of the Bowden family turns in John D. MacDonald's The Executioners. It is the last day of July, the final day of Jamie Bowden's camp session, and the day Carol Bowden was to have driven down and picked Jamie up in the afternoon and taken him back to Suffern with her. Instead, it becomes the day Max Cady's campaign of terror crosses from menace into outright violence, when Jamie is shot. The date is the pivot between the long, creeping dread of the preceding weeks and the open warfare that follows, and it is the wound around which the novel's final movements — Carol's breakdown, Sam's moral collapse, and the lethal confrontation on the island — all revolve.