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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
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