A heaven-sent vampire novel set in Princeton University, sequel to the smartly amusing The Book of Common Dread (1993), which featured a 500-year-old, piano-playing bloodsucker whose great love was Bach. He's dead now, done in by beauteous Frederika Vanderveen and rare-books curator Simon Penn, but the big Bad Guy down in hell still wants the ancient scrolls that Frederika has hidden and that confirm the immediate rise of His vampire legions. Yes, Satan is about to inherit the earth and bring eternal darkness to mankind by way of a glorious curative powder that heals all ills and wounds, grants superhuman strength and eternal youth, but condemns the recipient to life without sunlight. Its sale will dwarf the huge cocaine sales of the Colombian cartel, although these criminals are to be the powder's first salesmen and fathers to the rising legions of darkness. Frederika herself has become addicted to the powder but is set on alerting the world to its tremendous danger. How? By publishing the prophecies in the ancient scrolls, once they've been authoritatively translated. Satan, however, wants the scrolls burned and sets his minions out to get them. Simon and Frederika flee to the Continent in search of a great translator while 2,500- year-old Radu Negru (known also as Pallido Mors, or Pale Death), who taught Vlad Tepes (Dracula) everything about impalement, pursues them. Meanwhile, Father Dante Ferro of the Vatican, a cop turned priest, also pursues the scrolls, while aiding Simon Penn. Then Frederika, now bloodsucking, disappears. Will her addiction part the lovers forever? The answer suggests that a welcome third installment is underway with the vampires arising. Vampire vitamins for the intelligently bloodthirsty.
Pub Date: Oct. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13436-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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