Despite his gratingly earnest introduction about the value of cautionary tales, Nayes doesn’t so much take on science gone...
Second medical thriller from Nayes (Gargoyles, 2001): a gross-out horror tale admirable for its detailed medical procedures and conspicuous tweaking of slasher-genre clichés.
A lonely woman who survives a brutally disgusting assault (she’s found covered with yucky stuff from a sewer) in a bad part of Los Angeles emits a genuine “bloodcurdling scream” in a hospital emergency room and drops dead when she relives the incident in her dreams. Then, Vicki Zambisi, who’s undergone several surgical operations to repair her deformed skull, breaks into an old creepy boarded-up hotel in the same lousy neighborhood to retrieve a memento that just might reveal the dark secret about the awful experiments conducted by the brilliant, respected, but oh-so-mad cryogenic research scientist Dr. Wesley Kovacs. Inside the hotel, she barely escapes from the sewage-encrusted slasher. In the same hospital where the slasher’s first victim died, Zambisi meets Dr. Julie Charmaine, a young, quietly competent part-time counselor for assaulted women who’s also a full-time scientist studying dreams. Charmaine has a machine that uses a supercomputer to create visual images of what people are dreaming. Simmering romance (for Charmaine: the identity of the subject of Zambisi’s former affections is a key to the plot) comes from former boxer and now devastatingly handsome Homicide Detective Matt Guardian. More women must suffer inhumanly horrible assaults in and around the creepy old hotel before the trio can retrieve a nightmarish image of the assailant and thus unmask Dr. Kovacs’s insane scheme and discover that the not-quite-human monster is only looking for love.
Despite his gratingly earnest introduction about the value of cautionary tales, Nayes doesn’t so much take on science gone amok as grotesquely revisit classic B-movie shocker scenes.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30613-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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