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SUPERSTITIOUS

First adult novel by a children's author who already sells better than Stephen King, with 45 million copies in print of his 56 titles: a serial-killer suspense story that turns into romantic horror. Stine's tale opens with a strong shock as a young woman has her scalp ripped off, spine cracked, eyes thumbed out, and insides removed; then it lapses into a kind of depthless, mirror-smooth chitchat somewhere between YA and adult levels made up before your very eyes and not bearing a second thought. Sara Morgan, 24, has lost her Manhattan job at Concord Publishing, split from her psychotic boyfriend Chip, and returned to Moore State College to earn a grad degree in psychology. At a seafood restaurant with her close friend Mary Beth Logan, she meets handsome, charming, superstition-ridden Liam O'Connor, visiting professor of folklore. He's a Daniel Day-Lewis look-alike who lives with his sister Margaret and definitely is flirting with Sara. Then Milton Cohn, dean of students, a self-amused body-builder and knife collector who's always cutting his hands, offers Sara a part-time job largely because of her big breasts (such are the book's plot ploys). Soon more bodies drop and insides spill, including those of Liam's old girlfriend from Chicago as well as Chip's from Manhattan. The irresistible Liam comes onto Sara like Maxim de Winter roping in the second Mrs. de Winter, insistently charming and marrying her. On his bad tongue days, a huge purple three-foot tongue with a mind of its own slithers out of him. But who sends Sara four bloody rabbit's feet warning her about Liam? And Margaret and Milton, well, very special things happen to them. A face-off with Liam's demons of superstition is as foreseeable as steam on a rainy window. With zillions of aging young readers awaiting his newest work, Stine's may be just the fresh-flowing jolt of harmless horror pap to turn cash registers rhapsodic. (Film rights to Miramax; author tour)

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1995

ISBN: 0-446-51953-7

Page Count: 384

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

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

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