First behemoth installment (800+ pp.) in a new occult romance by Rice—now moving back into the bougainvillea and the New Orleans Garden District for her steamy new world of southern witchcraft. It's a couple of hundred pages (or more) before Rice hooks the reader and gets her major characters together; the story circles about the Mayfair family (bulking out the book are a few dozen family vignettes) and the generations of Mayfair witches who have accumulated one of the world's great fortunes while awaiting "the thirteenth"—the thirteenth witch in their succession, who will be the doorway by which a supernormal entity enters the human world and takes flesh. Dr. Rowan Mayfair—a San Francisco brain surgeon gifted with second sight, the power to heal (she foretells which cases will live before she lifts her knife), and the power to kill with her mind—was taken at birth from her Mayfair witch mother and raised by an aunt in San Francisco, and never knows until her mother dies that she is to inherit $7.5 billion. Meanwhile, alone and stormbound in her yacht, Rowan rescues a floating body from the sea, a wealthy local architect dead for an hour and being instructed by Mayfair figures in the beyond, and brings him back to life. Michael Curry now finds himself "cursed" with the power of psychometry (extrasensory fingertips) and has to wear gloves to stop the inflow of images. These two are being watched by—and then taken into the confidence of—Aaron Lightnet, a member of the Talamasca, a secret organization that for six centuries has investigated the paranormal. He warns Rowan and Michael against the Mayfair witches. An entity that has yet to achieve flesh has been passing itself through the eldest Mayfair women since the first Mayfair witch was burned at the stake in Holland. Now Rowan is pregnant by Michael, and the entity wants to become her fetus and flesh at last. The entity is by far the liveliest invention in the novel and the reader is left cliffhanging as this rather benign energy-being—fully (and erotically) empowered—is seen running off to Switzerland with Rowan. A writing mishmash, but a strong story stamps itself onto the brain.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1990
ISBN: 0345384466
Page Count: 1049
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
With only a sliver less suspense, Koontz follows up 1996's Intensity with an afterlife novel about a plane crash. Los Angeles crime reporter Joe Carpenter (ah, those initials) needs resurrecting. One year ago his wife, Michelle, and two daughters, Chrissie and little Nina, actually did die in a devastating plane crash over Colorado: no survivors. In a dive, the plane had rocketed straight into millennial rock, leaving only two pieces larger than a car door. Joe, locked in unbearable grief, has quit work, sold his house, moved to a studio apartment over a garage, and is gnawing himself to death with weight loss. Meetings with a compassionate survivor group haven't helped. Rage and anger with an unjust God in whom Joe doesn't believe takes up all his energy. Then visiting his wife and children's graves, Joe finds Dr. Rose Tucker, a black Asian woman with great presence who's taking Polaroids of his family's burial sites. She tells him she survived the crash! But suddenly two men appear and start shooting at her as she races off. Joe soon finds himself involved in unraveling a suicide plague that has struck relatives of the plane's dead. Rose has taken Polaroids of the graves of other relatives as well—but whoever gets one of her pictures first sees a blissful image of the afterlife, then commits suicide, often horribly. As Joe tracks Rose down, he hears that a little girl survived with her, a girl named Nina. Has mankind reached a turning point, as Dr. Tucker avers, at which science has now proven the existence of the afterlife? Funded by a multibillionaire, a secret but massive scientific effort larger than the Manhattan Project has made fantastic strides in the paranormal and revealed a breakthrough into . . . but some baddies want to use this discovery for their own ends, and thus Joe and Rose—and Nina!—must be killed. Masterfully styled, serious entertainment. These are Koontz's great years. (First printing 600,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42526-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fable about the consolatory and strengthening powers of religion flounders about somewhere inside this unconventional coming-of-age tale, which was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The story is told in retrospect by Piscine Molitor Patel (named for a swimming pool, thereafter fortuitously nicknamed “Pi”), years after he was shipwrecked when his parents, who owned a zoo in India, were attempting to emigrate, with their menagerie, to Canada. During 227 days at sea spent in a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450-pound Bengal tiger (mostly with the latter, which had efficiently slaughtered its fellow beasts), Pi found serenity and courage in his faith: a frequently reiterated amalgam of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs. The story of his later life, education, and mission rounds out, but does not improve upon, the alternately suspenseful and whimsical account of Pi’s ordeal at sea—which offers the best reason for reading this otherwise preachy and somewhat redundant story of his Life.
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100811-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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