A sometimes-engaging horror story with a familiar, predictable conclusion.
Three 20-somethings’ holiday in Bulgaria becomes a vacation from hell in Dash’s (The Evil and the Pure, 2014) horror novel.
Dominic and his best friend, Curran, are easy travelers to please—get them drunk and they’re happy. Martini, Dominic’s girlfriend, has tolerated their behavior long enough and wants more from her holiday experience. Taking control of the itinerary, she surprises the boys with a culture- and nature-filled road trip through Bulgaria. Martini’s excitement about the trip isn’t reciprocated, however. From the outset, the trio’s obvious lack of chemistry is grating, which is only exacerbated by the tired roles they inhabit: nagging girlfriend; combative, crude best friend; and apathetic boyfriend. With each new town they visit, Martini and Dominic’s relationship inches toward demise, mostly because of Curran and his insatiable attraction to the bar scene. Lurking in the Bulgarian shadows, however, is a far greater, more intriguing threat. When Dominic and Curran ditch Martini (yet again) to hang out with a group of local teenagers, the night leads them to a secret lake in the woods where copious drinking, skinny-dipping, and flirtation abound. That is, until Dominic and Curran are beaten and left naked after Curran flirts with the wrong girl. When Dominic wakes the next afternoon, he’s badly sunburned and alone—and then, at his weakest moment, a lurking beast arrives. Dominic’s ensuing struggle to find his friend, stay alive, and defeat the creature is vivid and unrelenting, and Dash fully realizes the unnamed monster in all of its grotesque, imposing physicality. During this section, the novel offers captivating tension and brutal, gory fun. If only it ended there, because after the exhilarating hide-and-seek contest between man and beast, the rest of the story feels flat and contrived. It isn’t helped by references to the silliness of horror-movie archetypes, which only weaken the horror tropes littered throughout the story.
A sometimes-engaging horror story with a familiar, predictable conclusion.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511568807
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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