Tops in fantasy, with gripping paleontological sidebars. A fancy companion, Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, will also...
A corker from an Irish-born paleontologist and dark-fiction author (Silk, not reviewed).
Chance Matthews’s parents died in a car crash in which Chance herself was injured, and her grandmother, a retired paleontologist, hanged herself when Chance was 15. When her grandfather, a geologist with whom she lives outside Birmingham, Alabama, dies of a heart attack, he leaves behind many bags of uncleaned fossils and minerals. Meanwhile, Chance has found her best friend Elise bedding Chance’s boyfriend Deacon, and Elise, pleading narcotically diminished responsibility, pills out and slashes her arms from wrist to elbow. Since Kiernan’s prologue sets up the Persephone-in-Tartarus myth, those in the know will wait for a tunnel to hell to appear bearing the darkness of D.H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians.” All turns on a night Chance, Elise, and Deacon spent in the waterworks tunnel under Red Mountain and Deacon saw something hellacious. Now albino Dancy Flammarion shows up, knowing what Deacon saw, knowing stuff about Chance only Chance knows, and declaring, “I can see monsters.” She senses that Deacon, an alcoholic, has had second sight and the preternatural ability to tell where lost bodies are buried ever since the night when he was working in an Atlanta liquor store and saw a man set himself afire with 151-proof rum. Lost bodies? A hundred years ago workmen found a small white . . . trilobite? monster? . . . in the tunnel under Red Mountain, and Chance’s grandmother preserved half of one in a small jar of alcohol. The horrified workmen bricked up the lower part of the tunnel to keep the unspeakable blocked off. Now that Something from Deep Time has caused countless deaths. But what’s behind that hideous wall, Mr. Lovecraft? What threshold?
Tops in fantasy, with gripping paleontological sidebars. A fancy companion, Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, will also appear. Well, why not?Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2001
ISBN: 0-451-45858-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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