Rapturous fantasy, few chills.
Thirty-three original horrifics from America, Great Britain, and Australia, some from established stars, others from hot new supernovas, as chosen by an editor from each land mass.
Not since reading a tale by Clark Ashton Smith in his teens, about some abominable velvety black brain-eaters clinging to the ceiling of a cave into whose darkness the hero must go has this reader experienced “horror” in fiction, that is, a pure state or affect divorced from the supernatural, weird, SF, or dark fantasy. Can it be that nothing that sets out to horrify ever does? Horror comes in the backdoor and is unexpected, though shock cuts in movies, such as the dead twin daughters standing in a deserted hotel hallway in Kubrick/King’s The Shining, can have one jump in the seat the first time one sees the film. This sheaf kicks off brightly with Steve Nagy’s “The Hanged Man of Oz,” about a new figure discovered in the Judy Garland movie, a hanged man in the woods where the live trees are tricked into giving up their apples. And Dorothy and the Tin Man and Scarecrow, as well as the Wicked Witch, are not the characters you thought they were. Fun and inventive, yes, but horrifying? Not really. Kim Newman’s truly brilliant chunka kafka, “The Intervention,” opens with a man coming into his office and being faced with an AA–like intervention, enjoined by his family and officemates, all his keys taken from him, his computer codes and credit cards revoked, cell phone snicked in half. Humiliatingly, even his kids sign him away, in crayon, as he’s stripped naked and put into an ambulance. All of this—for what reason? In “Blake’s Angel,” by Janeen Welsh, the poet Blake Williams, suffering from poet’s block, buys a captured angel from a grimy angel-trader and takes it home to his grubby apartment for inspiration. Also on hand: Ray Bradbury, the late Cherry Wilder, Tim Waggoner, Gahan Wilson, Graham Joyce, and others.
Rapturous fantasy, few chills.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30179-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
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