Lively fun, though not as stylish as Stoker or Kim Newman.
Simply amazing! First-novelist Kupfer, who teaches film and lit studies largely devoted to horror, has a grandfather . . . well, that’s too involved, but a Kupfer family heirloom exists: a diary written by none other than Bram Stoker’s great vampire hunter, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
Which is what Kupfer here presents. It’s nicely illustrated by someone with an unreadable signature (“VH”?) who clearly loves celebrated fantasy artist Virgil Finlay. Professor Van Helsing tells us (back in 1886) that he’s open-minded about folk cures, herbs, fetishes, etc., and so when he hears Hungarian Dr. Radu Borescu lecture about a blood contagion in Transylvania, he decides to accept Borescu’s offer of a visit to darkest Hungary for further folk-learning. Meanwhile, Van Helsing’s wife Rita lies quite pale from this very contagion, though Abraham thinks she’s only mildly ill. No sooner does he arrive at Borescu’s country retreat than a vampire dissolves before him into green muck when it tries to cross running water. Shocking? Well, Van Helsing absorbs this horror rather easily. That evening he himself is attacked by a child vampire and a naked, large-breasted Lamia named Malia, whom the erotically entranced doctor must invite into his room before she can caress and strike her canines into his neck. When Dr. Borescu tries to save Van Helsing, however, Malia does attack and fatally infect Borescu. Then it’s up to a pious Father Dobra and Van Helsing to drive a wooden stake through Borescu’s heart as his crimson eyes mark his full turning and befoulment. Van Helsing vows to fight these creatures, but the train he leaves on is attacked by Malia (who turned Vlad Tepes centuries ago), giant bats, and slavering wolves that leave an abomination of bodies in the compartments. Can things get worse? Yes, indeed, as Van Helsing finds when his seemingly recovered wife wastes and falls into crimson-eyed delirium. Will Rita need . . . the stake?
Lively fun, though not as stylish as Stoker or Kim Newman.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31011-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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