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
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop...
A convicted murderer who may be a latter-day Messiah wants to donate his heart to the sister of one of his victims, in Picoult’s frantic 15th (Nineteen Minutes, 2007, etc.).
Picoult specializes in hot-button issues. This latest blockbuster-to-be stars New Hampshire’s first death-row inmate in decades, Shay Bourne, a 33-year-old carpenter and drifter convicted of murdering the police officer husband of his employer, June, and her seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Eleven years later Shay is still awaiting execution by lethal injection. Suddenly, miracles start to happen around Shay—cell-block tap water turns to wine, an AIDS-stricken fellow inmate is cured, a pet bird and then a guard are resurrected from the dead. Shay’s spiritual adviser, Father Michael, is beginning to believe that Shay is a reincarnation of Christ, particularly when the uneducated man starts quoting key phrases from the Gnostic gospels. Michael hasn’t told Shay that he served on the jury that condemned him to death. June’s daughter Claire, in dire need of a heart transplant, is slowly dying. When Shay, obeying the Gnostic prescription to “bring forth what is within you,” offers, through his attorney, ACLU activist Maggie, to donate his heart, June is at first repelled. Practical obstacles also arise: A viable heart cannot be harvested from a lethally injected donor. So Maggie sues in Federal Court to require the state to hang Shay instead, on the grounds that his intended gift is integral to his religious beliefs. Shay’s execution looms, and then Father Michael learns more troubling news: Shay, who, like Jesus, didn’t defend himself at trial, may be innocent.
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop plot.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9674-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel.
Polished debut fiction, from Australian author Simsion, about a brilliant but emotionally challenged geneticist who develops a questionnaire to screen potential mates but finds love instead. The book won the 2012 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.
“I became aware of applause. It seemed natural. I had been living in the world of romantic comedy and this was the final scene. But it was real.” So Don Tillman, our perfectly imperfect narrator and protagonist, tells us. While he makes this observation near the end of the book, it comes as no surprise—this story plays the rom-com card from the first sentence. Don is challenged, almost robotic. He cannot understand social cues, barely feels emotion and can’t stand to be touched. Don’s best friends are Gene and Claudia, psychologists. Gene brought Don as a postdoc to the prestigious university where he is now an associate professor. Gene is a cad, a philanderer who chooses women based on nationality—he aims to sleep with a woman from every country. Claudia is tolerant until she’s not. Gene sends Rosie, a graduate student in his department, to Don as a joke, a ringer for the Wife Project. Finding her woefully unsuitable, Don agrees to help the beautiful but fragile Rosie learn the identity of her biological father. Pursuing this Father Project, Rosie and Don collide like particles in an atom smasher: hilarity, dismay and carbonated hormones ensue. The story lurches from one set piece of deadpan nudge-nudge, wink-wink humor to another: We laugh at, and with, Don as he tries to navigate our hopelessly emotional, nonliteral world, learning as he goes. Simsion can plot a story, set a scene, write a sentence, finesse a detail. A pity more popular fiction isn’t this well-written. If you liked Australian author Toni Jordan's Addition (2009), with its math-obsessed, quirky heroine, this book is for you.
A sparkling, laugh-out-loud novel.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2908-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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