After a few fun/creepy first chapters, the manipulated plot seems forced, obvious and lacking in suspense.
As the title declares, Corman’s eighth novel (A Perfect Divorce, 2004, etc.) centers on a young New Yorker’s rocky relationship with her new boyfriend, who is either a jerk or Evil Incarnate.
At 24, Ronnie is already a successful freelance journalist, but her social life is in the doldrums. While researching an article on a satanic church in the city, she interviews Richard Smith, a historian who studies satanic worship. When she asks his opinion of Satanism, he offers only a vague view that since good exists, so might evil, but Richard is strikingly handsome and Ronnie is soon swept away by his debonair charms and sexual magnetism. After her article on the satanic church comes out, Ronnie receives a dead black cat and assumes the church’s cultish leader, Randall Cummings, sent it as a threat. Meanwhile, Richard, who travels frequently for his work, sees Ronnie whenever he is in town, but her friends sense there is something off about him. Then Richard’s editor offers Ronnie a book deal to write about satanic possession. While working on the book, Ronnie begins to have the disquieting experience of enhanced powers, winning a race and drawing an elaborate sketch while blacked out. After receiving a picture of a decapitated head, Ronnie goes to confront Randall Cummings. Again, she blacks out. Randall turns up dead, and she’s a suspect. She begins to see Satan’s face, first in dreams but then on the street. After interviewing a mental patient whose satanic lover looked a lot like Richard, she comes to believe she may be possessed. A lapsed Catholic, she turns to her childhood priest in the Bronx, who holds an exorcism. Ronnie is saved/cured, but the last we see of Richard, he is talking on his cell phone and smiling enigmatically.
After a few fun/creepy first chapters, the manipulated plot seems forced, obvious and lacking in suspense.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34979-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
