A fungoid fecund novel that will leave dreamers mucky with the mildews that eat upon the dead.
Twelfth doorstop volume in Lumley’s already swollen vampire series (Necroscope: Invaders, 1999, etc.), with the next installment (Necroscope: Avengers) announced.
Here is a series hopelessly in need of a Necropedia: Footsteps of the Dead encyclical to help keep all the Wamphyri and their factotums straight amid the parallel universes of bloodsucker invaders and the varied vampire hunters tracking them down. The principals, the now dead but actually undead Necroscope Harry Keogh, and today’s Jake Cutter, are themselves composed of so many splintered figures, often evil, that even Lumley’s opening résumés, while reminding old readers of faded meteor arcs in the series’ overarching plotline, are of little help to the necronovice. Worse, Lumley’s densely dumbfounding résumés come in a spaghetti tangle of twisted grammar and seem typed under hypnosis or by autopilot on deep sedative. Yes, Harry Keogh’s dead, but he’s splintered into golden darts in other universes, although one dart has landed in the dreaming subconscious of Jake Cutter, a leading vampire killer with Britain’s supersecret E-Branch (ESP trackers of the dead). Jake has an added secret: Aside from having a revenant of Harry in him, he also houses a fragment of Korath Mindsthrall, an important vampire killed by Harry in Romania, whose knowledge allows Jake to travel through the Mobius Continuum and speak with the dead. Korath is infected by the powers of Malinari, Lord of the Wamphyri. And let’s not forget hideously beautiful Vavara, hag rival of Malinari, who eats wild honey and wolf hearts, and adds a sprinkle of lust to an otherwise entirely abstract though bloodthirsty thriller. Now, as if Wamphyri aren’t enough to deal with, Jake seeks the blood of Mafioso Luigi Castellano, whose mob killed his girlfriend and whose members are tied to an alien parallel dimension.
A fungoid fecund novel that will leave dreamers mucky with the mildews that eat upon the dead.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-87261-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you’d expect from Palahniuk.
The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk (Choke, 2001, etc.) concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare.
Carl Streator is a grizzled City Desk reporter whose outlook on life has a lot to do with years of interviewing grief-stricken parents, spouses, children, victims, and survivors. His latest investigation is a series of crib deaths. A very good reporter, one thing he’s got is an eye for detail, and he notices that there’s always a copy of the same book (Poems and Rhymes Around the World) at the scene of these deaths. In fact, more often than not, the book is open to an African nursery rhyme called a “culling chant.” A deadly lullaby? It sounds crazy, but Carl discovers that simply by thinking about someone while reciting the poem he can knock him off in no time at all. First, his editor dies. Then an annoying radio host named Dr. Sara. It’s too much to be a coincidence: Carl needs help—and fast, before he kills off everyone he knows. He investigates the book and finds that it was published in a small edition now mainly held in public libraries, so he begins by tracking down everyone known to have checked the book out. This brings him to the office of Helen Hoover Boyle, a realtor who makes a good living selling haunted houses—and reselling them a few months later after the owners move out. A son of Helen’s died of crib death about 20 years ago, and she’s reluctant to talk to Carl until he gains the confidence of her Wiccan secretary, Mona Sabbat. Together, Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona’s ecoterrorist/scam-artist boyfriend Oyster set out across the country to find and destroy every one of the 200-plus remaining copies of Poems and Rhymes. But can Carl (and Helen) forget the chant themselves? Pandora never did manage to get her box shut, after all.
Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you’d expect from Palahniuk.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50447-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
