A sprawling comedy of horrors, the possibility of its spilling over into a third manifestation certainly welcome.
This tangy second go-round for Fox’s quarter-ton vampire gives readers a run for their money at telling the bloodsuckers from the leeches.
Having blown himself into 187 white rats at the end of Fat White Vampire Blues (2003), New Orleans vampire Jules Duchon is gathered by his friend Doodlebug Richelieu and reassembled (mostly; he’s missing a critical element of the male anatomy) into the mountainous undead he once was. The High Krewe of Vlad Tepes, an arrogant and wealthy company of Eastern European vampires living outside New Orleans, wants Duchon to find whoever is mutilating members of their association. Duchon comes into contact with a wide array of savory and unsavory characters—and finely described slices of New Orleans—allowing Fox to throw jabs and sling darts. Says Doodlebug of his new home: “California is different from the rest of the country. A combination of widespread Wiccanism and Hollywood liberalism means that blood-drinking is not as stigmatized as it would be here.” Sass and smarts are also in his bag of tricks, whether he’s poking fun at Internet searches or driving home a little social commentary on racism and greed. The plot is intricate enough to be more mystery than horror tale, with a complicated land scam that turns out to be something of a red herring, while grave tampering, lost loves, new loves, rotten apples, and morality plays are all kept aloft in sensible procession. Then the story accelerates into a mad whirligig, with Duchon’s dead mentor reappearing, his 40-year-dead mother reappearing (with his penis in tow), and a bride of Frankenstein (his mother wants her to be the bride of Duchon) appearing. Centrifugal forces could easily take the story down to crash and burn, but Fox commands the pyrotechnics and pilots to a sweet landing.
A sprawling comedy of horrors, the possibility of its spilling over into a third manifestation certainly welcome.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46408-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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