Stories that show death as a piddling health lapse like, say, the flu.
Mixed bag of diabolicals never before seen in the US that may intrigue fans and gain a few new ones.
Though best-known for his endless Necroscope series (Necroscope: Avengers, 2001, plus eleven other behemoths in the series), Lumley first arrived in print as a Lovecraft wannabe with his own Cthulhu horror series that featured Titus Crow and had more action than the master but less style (Titus Crow, Volume One: The Burrowers Beneath and Transition), as mobile sludge bubbled with hellish dreams and babbling madness—the horror, the horror! Folded into his Harry Keogh Necroscope tales are two other long works, including The Psychomech Trilogy, while The Dreamland Series (four volumes) features David Hero and Eldin the Wanderer. All of this is background to the present patchwork, which collects what often read like early bottom-drawer leftovers amateurishly clogged with adverbial excess and far distant in style from the masterful title tale in Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi (1993). Lumley opens here with three tales of Titus Crow, the psychic detective who later becomes the slayer of varied Lovecraftian aliens and sea-bottom monsters. In “Inception,” though, he’s seen almost at birth as he’s baptized with holy water that contains a mysterious and powerful Middle Eastern elixir that fixes him squarely into his destiny as a destroyer of satanic forces. “The Weird Wines of Naxas Niss” and “Stealer of Dreams” show David Hero and Eldin as agents of the king of the Dreamlands and even offer a whiff of sex. Brand-new are the vampire killer Harry Keogh stories, the Lovecraftian “Resurrection,” and the much longer “Dinosaur Dreams” (with crazy fossils!) and “Dead Eddy,” set in Las Vegas and featuring a dead master gambler still addicted to the music of the slots and the possibility of a last big win.
Stories that show death as a piddling health lapse like, say, the flu.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30847-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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