Alternative-history vampire science/fantasy by Stableford (The Third Millennium, 1985), a novelist with degrees in biology and sociology. Stableford details the sociobiology of vampires with a fineness that puts top vampirist Anne Rice in the shade as a cultural chronicler. His story largely is laid three centuries ago in England when the civilized world, led out of the Dark Ages by the rise of vampires, is governed by an aristocracy of vampires who rule by fear. Vampires seemingly cannot love or feel pain; females are barren, and males have a low sex drive. They feed on—and draw their number from—common men. But how do the vampires reproduce from the commoners? This question haunts Edmund Cordery, courtier to Richard the Lion-Hearted (a vampire, of course), who has just devised a microscope that reveals the small world of microbes that he thinks can help overthrow vampire rule if the spermatic base of vampirism can be found. When Edmund kills a lady vampire by purposefully inoculating himself with the black plague before she drinks his blood, his son Neil—a budding social revolutionary- -flees England, seeking the microbial code. Neil knows vampires don't pass on their ``emortality'' by magic—it's something to do with their blood. He joins a pirate band and goes to Africa, fabled homeland of vampires, and in the wonderfully described Uruba tribe finds himself in vampire paradise where the biology of vampirism is at last revealed. An asteroid ages ago struck here, carrying on it ``the breath of life''—emortality microbes, which are now carried in vampire semen, which in turn must be applied to an open wound to be effective.... After the huge vampire battle of the Spanish Armada, the story leaps three centuries ahead for a brief look into modern worldwide emortality as analyzed by microbiologist Michael Southerne, who has Cordery's Syndrome (he must die, never emortal, because his blood resists vampire microbes). Terrific vampire fiction, with well-humanized puppet characters.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-88184-742-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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