SUMMARY of Freak The Mighty

SO FAR...

Max is in middle school when he finds out that a boy named Kevin (known to as "Freak") and his mother, Gwen, ([Guinevere]) are moving into the house next door. Kevin has morquio syndrome and wears leg braces and uses crutches and thinks of himself as a robot. When Max initially approaches Freak, Freak acts with hostility. However, some time later, they start to become friends. Freak eventually starts riding on Max's shoulders. They begin to call themselves "Freak the Mighty." They go on adventures, which Freak pretends are King Arthur's quests, such as going to the hospital which Freak claims has a secret department called the "Bionics Department" which has had his brain cat scanned to be fitted into a bionic body. On one adventure they find a woman's purse in the sewer.

They return it to the woman who is named Loretta Lee. She is the wife of Iggy Lee, boss of a motorcycle gang who "struck fear in everyone, even the cops," as Max puts it. Iggy says that the two of them once knew Max's father.

Later Freak has an emergency at school and is taken to the hospital. Then after that, Grim reveals to Max that his father has been let out on parole. Throughout the story, it has been slowly revealed that Max's father killed his mother by strangling her, and that Grim and Gram hate his father and are afraid of Max ending up like him. Max is shocked and scared by the news of his father's parole. After Christmas Eve, Max is woken up by his father, Killer Kane, who has come to take him. After Max is kidnapped by his father, the two walk to Iggy Lee's apartment in the "New Tenements/New Testaments".

Killer Kane is even bigger than Max and acts in a very threatening, intimidating manner towards everyone, including his son, whom he keeps tied up. Killer Kane swears that he did not murder Max's mother. On Christmas morning he leaves Max alone, tied up in a room in an old abandoned apartment that had almost been completely burnt down. Loretta, shocked that Kane would do something like that to his own child, tries to help Max escape.

Killer Kane catches her and starts to strangle her. Max attempts to stop him and reveals that he witnessed his father kill his mother in the same fashion. Kane then tries to kill him by strangling him, but Freak arrives just in time and saves Max by squirting Kane with a squirt gun in the eye which he claims is filled with sulfuric acid when in fact, it is filled with soap, vinegar, and curry powder. The police are waiting outside, and Killer Kane is taken back to prison and has to serve his original time plus ten years. Things end far from happily, however. Kevin is admitted to the hospital and dies shortly after giving Max a blank journal and telling him to write the story of Freak the Mighty in it, which Max does as a last mark of respect for his friend.