by Brian Lumley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2004
Mystic arts! Dark forces! Despite the occasional “greased lightning” clinker, fans will find this classy stuff.
Hardcover reprint of Lumley’s early-’80s mass-market paperback, a youthful and super-purple blast of Egyptology, clearly aimed at fans who’ve collected cloth editions of his 13-volume Necroscope vampire epic.
Sheathed in a scarlet shift, her right breast exposed, dark-eyed, raven-haired Ashtarta, sovereign Candace of Kush, is to marry General Khai Ibizin formerly of Khem (to be known as Egypt in coming times). She looks into the magic pool of Yuh-Shesh, hoping to foresee the results of her army’s battle against Kush’s ages-old enemy Khem, ruled by pyramid-building Pharaoh Khasathut. Instead, she sees Khai in some strange place where great birds bear humans aloft in their bellies without eating them, where carts without oxen or horses speed with people in strange and wondrous garb, where giant ships without sails cross the seas. It turns out, when Khai is returned to Ashtarta half-dead, that Pharaoh’s wizards have sent his ka into the future; unless it returns, his body will die. Khai’s old friend General Manek Thotak, who desires Ashtarta for himself, surrenders his ka to be sent by Ashtarta’s wizards into the future to bring back Khai. The wizards bury Ashtarta’s funerary mask with a ring each from Khai and Manek. Manek is supposed to dig up the mask and rings, show them to Khai, and spirit him back to his homeland. In the future, Khai awakes in London as Paul Arnott, whose fellow Egyptologist Wilfred Sommers shows him the funerary mask of Sh’tarra. Khai does return to Kush, with knowledge of future weaponry he puts to use.
Mystic arts! Dark forces! Despite the occasional “greased lightning” clinker, fans will find this classy stuff.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31047-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
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