With a riveting villain, diverse cast, and mesmerizing violence, this epic offers plenty of meat on the bone for sword and...
An immortal tyrant and his soul-collecting lieutenant bid to enslave the Western world in Harwood’s debut novel, the first volume in a sword and sorcery saga.
Pieter Thomas, a fisherman in the raw Caribbean dotted with European plantations and slave labor, hurries to his island for the birth of his son. The newborn soon shows miraculous gifts. A valiant but unassuming Dutchman, Pieter doubts the lurid tales surrounding Jeringas Mortifer, evil ruler of much of nearby Venezuela. Mortifer is said to be 2,500 years old, bending thousands to his will by touch and sight alone. But all indeed grows dark as readers meet Mortifer’s chief lieutenant, the Soul Collector. Bringing dread and death, he serves both Mortifer and their higher authority, the dark powers of the supernatural “continuum.” The Collector kills quickly but imprisons the souls of esteemed opponents. Mortifer and the Collector seek two prophetic stone tablets, which tell of a Child of Prophecy who will free the Caribbean of evil. As the plot unfolds, a seer—the Mother of the Third Eye—guides the Dutch fisherman. In a vision, she shows him his newborn son’s stupendous but fraught future. Later, as readers learn the appalling key to Mortifer’s immortality, he orders the Collector to explore an alliance with an island of vampires. In the final pages, the heavens confirm the approach of a cataclysmic conflict. Here and elsewhere, readers will see the influence of other epics—The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, the New Testament, and tales of King Herod. But the novel stands well on its own. Impressively, a wide range of characters and settings lives vividly on the page: African slaves, British officers, and Spanish sailors, vulnerable clairvoyants and Romanian bloodsuckers all play their parts. But the Collector of Souls unquestionably leads the pack. Harwood has wisely endowed him with a sense of honor, which, even while he serves a sordid master, humanizes and redeems him.
With a riveting villain, diverse cast, and mesmerizing violence, this epic offers plenty of meat on the bone for sword and sorcery fans.Pub Date: May 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989375009
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Herschel-Floyd Publications
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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