The territory that was long ago ceded to Stephen King—ghostly goings-on in rural Maine—is entered to stunning effect in this absorbing tale of demonic possession, by the author of Sister Wolf (1980) and Group Sex (1986). Pragmatic and “sensible” Cora Whitman, wife of Episcopal priest Henry Lieber, tells in retrospect the story of Henry’s ministry in the town of Dry Falls, in south-central Maine, during the summer of 1974, when a killing heat wave and drought presage a frightening reversal of the natural order. Farm animals bear deformed offspring. A woman known to believe in the occult unaccountably “loses” part of a day. Two boarding-school girls playing at “witchcraft” see a mysterious figure lurking in a graveyard; “six girls” attending the same school are “discovered prostrate on their dormitory beds, naked and stupefied.” A nude sunbather is attended by a large black dog that appears as if from nowhere. Husbands inexplicably take sexual leave of their wives; then, as suddenly, become sexually insatiable. And, despite her tartly declared “low threshold of tolerance for anything mysterious,” Cora herself is “visited” by a presence whose shape and substance Arensberg teasingly discloses in a beautifully paced sequence of disturbingly hallucinatory scenes. But this is much more than a horror story. Henry Lieber’s “calling” to serve God is itself an unexplained phenomenon, as is the sudden aridity that afflicts his marriage. Both he and Cora are fully imagined, complex characters, and Arensberg’s unflinching analyses of their vacillating mutual understanding and intimacy, as well as of Cora’s tense relationships with her troubled mother Emily and sister Hannah, imbue this vivid story with an overlay of psychological realism that makes its (genuinely) supernatural dimension all the more horrific and threatening. As much as it transcends its genre, this is nonetheless one of the finest contemporary novels of the supernatural—the best since Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game. (Book-of-the-Month selection)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-394-55696-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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
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
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