A frivolous diversion from reality for the R.L. Stine fan.
An angry ghost seeks revenge for teenage bullying in this debut thriller inspired by the King of Pop’s darker lyrics.
After Diana’s husband dies in a car accident, she and her three daughters, Janet, Whitney and Sue, move back to Diana’s hometown of Gary, Indiana. In her late 30s, the attractive Diana appears to be mother of the year until strange things—such as unusually cold drafts—begin to happen in their new home. Diana starts sleepwalking, and when a voice tells her to “push” daughter Whitney’s voice box “for a surprise,” she nearly strangles Whitney. Horrified, the daughters move in with their grandmother, who lives a few doors down. The author’s simple style is easily accessible and has the feel of a late-night sleepover ghost story. For example, after the voice directs Diana to strangle Whitney “for a surprise,” the chapter ends with the exclamation “Surprise!” The voice is an angry ghost named Michael who is determined to make Diana suffer as she made him suffer many years ago. Diana can’t remember Michael, even though they dated in high school, and she is now living in the house where he died. He blames the suicide of his best friend, Susie, on Diana, because a jealous Diana framed Susie in high school by putting drugs in Susie’s locker and telling the principal. Diana spirals into alcoholism and many sleepless nights, and Michael taunts her with the words “Is It Scary?” in blood on the wall as the former teen bully morphs into a pathetic, tortured adult. Even with the cutesy references to Michael Jackson’s music and life (Gary, Indiana, is Jackson’s hometown), the plot is predictable. It’s hard to imagine why Diana would stay in the house or why Sue would move back in with her, but like actors in a B movie, the characters’ actions don’t always make sense, which can be a distraction. The fast-moving text relies on conventional horror story images and stale descriptions, which make it far from scary. For example, Michael acts like a comic book villain when mentally torturing Diana: “His hysterical laughter echoed the room and pierced through her spine, just like his threatening eyes through her terrified soul.”
A frivolous diversion from reality for the R.L. Stine fan.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1479385683
Page Count: 146
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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