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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
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