by Brian Lumley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2002
The Gibbering was too good an idea to spend on fantasy.
Hardcover of the final volume of the Psychomech Trilogy, formerly a 1995 paperback. Lumley’s most recent book in the States: Beneath the Moors and Darker Places (2002).
In all three installments, British Army Corporal Richard Garrison, blinded by a terrorist bomb, uses expanded brainpower to fight psychic villains. In Psychomech (1984), this power comes from the infernal machine named Psychomech, a mechanical psychiatrist begun by a German SS psychiatrist to help the Nazis build supermen. It does seem to vanquish death and indeed allows Garrison to revive a cryogenically preserved dead lover. Volume two, Psychosphere, locks Garrison into a paranormal place where he’s a multimind. His powers leak into the Psychosphere, empowering it, until he electrotransitions himself violently into the Psychosphere and begins to purge and purify the planet of its evils. Now, in Psychomok, there have been 20 years of peace on Earth when Psychomech goes mad and a million people, including Garrison’s son, Richard Stone, fall under the irreversible plague of insanity called The Gibbering—with only Richard, who has inherited his father’s mental powers, able to fight the horror and battle the bubble-brained mind-machine. When Richard’s mother, the woman brought back from the dead, is bisected in an auto accident, her remains shrivel, mummifying into her earlier death. The dead villain of Psychosphere, Charon Gubwa, a mental giant of ESP, returns as a telepathic fungi, invades J. C. Craig, an earlier co-builder of Psychomech, and orders him to build a new machine. Then Richard escapes and resumes his love affair with Craig’s daughter Lynn, although—to stay rational or even make love—he must force out a stream of obscenity to keep The Gibbering at bay. Chased by Craig’s hirelings, the lovers go on the run. Richard finds he can materialize food and teleport himself by thought. The final battle? Rather earthly.
The Gibbering was too good an idea to spend on fantasy.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30481-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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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