Only those fully empowered with eidetic recall need apply.
Thirteenth gigavolume in Lumley’s megaloid vampire epic, and the last of a trilogy (Necroscope: Invaders, 1999; Necroscope: Defilers, 2000).
Lumley’s series swells past mere human ability to keep its metamorphic storywarp on the mindscreen. Nor will a crossdimensional multimap, however wide-angled to include however many astral planes touched on by Lumley, bring sense to the abstract hopscotch of the epic’s general plan. But . . . to sum up: The original Necroscope and top vampire killer, Harry Keogh, dies (no big deal) and splits into several beings, including bits of the evil Lord Malinari (who has his own independent counterpart as well). Harry’s spot in Britain’s top-secret E-Branch (“E” for ESP) has been taken over by young new Necroscope Jake Cutter, who traces Malinari to Australia and destroys his fungi garden (which was spawning spores to enslave all humanity), although The Mind escapes. Lord Malinari and Lady Vavara (that beautiful hag with jewel-green eyes who loves wild honey and wolf hearts) now take up plans to bring humanity into lasting bloodlust and darkness forever, enjoining it to the predawn Vampire World of Starside/Sunside and using Manhattan’s greatest building as its aerie, after lacquering it black inside and out to block out sunlight. (Let us skip over the important Möbius Continuum as a means of metaphysical teleportation.) And we learn Jake’s secret: his mind bears vampire intelligence. Now on the run, Malinari and Vavara take over a gigantic ultramodern pleasure cruiser and soon infect its entire population with fear of sunlight. Should E-Branch sink this ship? Its very lifeboats are worth millions. Later, mentalist Ben Trask takes over much of the novel and, with a task force of E-Branch avengers, pursues Malinari, Vavara, and a host of girls from the vampirized cruise ship. Will Jake’s secret vampire intelligence become a power against Malinari? The climax feels more Schwarzeneggerian than occult.
Only those fully empowered with eidetic recall need apply.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87923-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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