Top-drawer.
Original stories from a dark place, as collected by Datlow, who, with Terri Windling, edits The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections.
The 16 here, about half by well-knowns and half by fresh voices, are meant to scare your pants off. That, of course, is unlikely, since fright hangs on surprise and if you know ahead. . . . Best foot forward is Jeffrey Ford’s utterly beautiful “The Trentino Kid,” which anchors its ghost in a close study of clamming in Great South Bay. If it weren’t for the occasional slippery-slimy body floating by, you’d want to get out and start clamming yourself. Joyce Carol Oates’s “Subway” is about a destiny-hungering woman with panting crimson lips and glistening mascara-ed eyes caught up in a recurring death-cycle on the subway. Gahan Wilson’s “The Dead Ghost” tells of a person waking up immobile in a hospital bed after an explosion to discover a fat, weighty, jellylike see-through body on the bed beside him and having to push his only moveable hand through the globby muck (it exhales corpse-stink) to get to the emergency button. Kathe Koja’s “Velocity” presents a sculptor whose current specialty is driving bicycles into trees. He’s the son of a vile artist, whom he calls the Prince of Darkness, who apparently burned his wife alive and later suicided by driving into a tree. Now his son is sure that Dad is crawling about the pipes of the Red House, which the son has inherited: he’s afraid to sit on the toilet and allow Dad to crawl up inside him. Ramsey Campbell’s “Feeling Remains” offers his usual marvel of domestic satire with acidic commentary on feminist strong-arming and the failed attempt to rein in a changeling who wants to burn down a house. Also on hand: Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, Terry Dowling, Jack Cady, Lucius Shepard, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, Daniel Abraham, Stephen Gallagher, and Mike O’Driscoll.
Top-drawer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30444-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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