Dorn may have written the horror novel we deserve.
In Dorn’s pulse-quickening debut novel, an LA lawyer–turned-rapper finds herself thrust into the spotlight and its attendant chaos.
“I’m a Virgo so I don’t take perfection lightly,” exclaims 30-year-old Prue Van Teesen, the misguided heroine of Dorn’s story. Living in Los Angeles—a sun-bleached land of egos, fame, and vanity—doesn’t make things easier. In pursuit of a more meaningful life, Prue decides to quit her antidepressants cold turkey, take a pause from her law profession, and instead focus on what matters: turning her talent for spitting lyrics into a rap career and “thriving.” When Prue’s girlfriend introduces her to music producer Jax Jameson, a human disco ball of manic talent and cocaine-fueled good times, they instantly “vibe,” and she’s soon enmeshed in his “Kingdom” of so-called creatives. During what feels like a fever dream of Adderall and various uppers, Prue records her first song under the stage name Vagablonde, starts a rap group called Shiny AF, and makes a number of ethically dubious decisions—like letting one of her law clients join the never-ending party. As Shiny AF catapults to stardom, Prue spins out of control, losing not just her girlfriend in the process, but herself as well. A tumultuous ride of emotional highs and lows (do yourself a favor and don’t read this in one sitting), Dorn’s narrative is intoxicating, particularly in its depiction of the existential ennui that’s stemmed from our insatiable consumer culture. In a music scene where self-commodification and virality reign, Prue’s validation no longer comes from her peers, but instead from her growing internet presence. Every morning she repeatedly refreshes her Twitter homepage, each time to more followers, feeling less in touch with the world the higher she rises.
Dorn may have written the horror novel we deserve.Pub Date: May 26, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951213-00-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
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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