An enchanting journey through the century, filled with a veritable circus of yarns.
A magical tale from Schulman (Swimming with Jonah, 1999, etc.), combining photographs, family tree graphs, and fanciful storytelling in the multigenerational Mourne family saga.
When 18-year-old Fran receives a phone call from her mother Gloria, it is one of the few bits of communication the two have had in the four years since Gloria ran away from home. Left alone on the family’s long-dilapidated Canadian farm, Fran has raised herself (when not in boarding school) on a mixture of longing and spite for her absent, charismatic mother. When the calls start coming, every evening at six o’clock sharp, Fran wants some answers, or at least normal conversation, but Gloria has another agenda: the recitation of the family stories. And so begins Fran’s tutelage—a string of tales outlandish and odd. Gloria tells first how Fran’s great-great-grandmother died as a young woman during Canada’s longest winter and then became a saint; how her 14 children moved the body to the barn, where it began to smell of lilacs, bees began to build hives, and for a century the body did not decompose. From this miraculous beginning, the stories of her children unfold—of the incomparably beautiful Celia, who marries a celebrated criminal and lives a life of glamour with a Colt .45 strapped to her thigh; and of Cessil, who finds a cigar-smoking bride in Rio and builds her a house named Brazil, a rambling mansion in Ft. Lauderdale built from the wealth amassed by his fierce, energetic wife. The house holds all the siblings (brought down from Canada, where they’d run an amusement park honoring the perfect body of their dead mother) as well as their spouses and children, the occupants and stories growing through the years. Not until late in the saga does Fran discover the reason for the mysterious calls—and why Gloria is racing to finish her tales.
An enchanting journey through the century, filled with a veritable circus of yarns.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-380-97799-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic "The Monkey's Paw"—a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here—as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the "Pet Sematary": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death—especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's "annex"—an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex—resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt—when dead Timmy Baterman was "transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?" Will Gage return to the living—but as "a thing of evil?" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise—and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0743412281
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK TO SCREEN
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