(Ed.’s note: On 31 October 2001 Professor von Kirkus, suffering from a severe, rough, fishlike scaling, babbling...
From the notebooks of Professor Kruger von Kirkus, Doctor of Lovecraftology:
I first came across this ms. in a labyrinth beneath the earth’s crust, a gigantic calcium cathedral once inhabited, now ravaged and abandoned, and bearing slime traces of the passage of mind-eating telepaths known as Thuun’Ha, the sentient offspring of those cultists of Cthulhu who feed on the brains of luminous lizards and mentally twisted young humans. What to make of these stiffly encrusted pages? Carbon-dating places the eldest back to 1969, while others smell of a mold found only in the fruiting fungi of Arkham House. Indeed, scratched on an early page are the words, “By the Unholy Author of Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (1996).” The longest entry in this ms. is labeled “Beneath the Moors” (first published by Arkham House in 1974) and reads like a bad head injury. This tells of a descent into the Devil’s Pool and the crumbling remnants of a long-lost underground fish civilization, if this ichthyotic alien species can be called civilized. Eight shorter entries leave one asking, What’s real? Are you real? Am I? “Dagon’s Bell,” a Lumleyization of Lovecraft’s “Deep Ones,” sets itself not in New England but under the phosphorescent rot and gurgling gases of nauseatingly miasmal kelp off the northeast coast of England. Readers dig at their skin and can barely breathe amid glowing putrescence, their brains choked by clotted and glutinous bursts of speech from slithering, slapping, flopping Deep Ones. “The Sun, the Sea, and the Silent Scream” tells of a woman’s scream so deep no sound comes out. “The Second Wish,” “Big ‘C’,” and “Rising with Surtsey,” all Cthulhu inspired, leave one in a blue glare under a gibbering moon.
(Ed.’s note: On 31 October 2001 Professor von Kirkus, suffering from a severe, rough, fishlike scaling, babbling deliriously, “They’re coming for me!” during a torrential rainfall, vanished into the Yorkshire Moors.)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87694-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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