Ruthless killers spark terrifying scenes throughout even if the ending remains a bit incomplete.
A relaxing excursion into the mountains turns into a nightmare when a New York family must face crazed, revenge-seeking killers in this debut thriller.
Film and TV star Ed Savage is looking forward to getting away to Black Ridge Falls with his extended family. He hopes it’ll ease tensions with his wife, Marlo, whose recent failed audition led to her anger-tinged envy of her husband’s success. An impatient Ed leaves early with Marlo; their youngest daughter, 6-year-old Lisa; and Marlo’s brother Simon Winchester. Unfortunately, things are bad almost immediately: Simon and Lisa both disappear right before a strange man attacks Marlo. The man, attempting to flee with the woman, crashes the family’s RV, with Marlo winding up in an induced coma. Cops subsequently arrest Ed, sure he was driving the RV, and the others remain missing. Hearing what’s happened, Lisa’s big sister, Ava, and cousin Heather Savage grab boyfriends and friends, pile into another RV, and head up to the mountains. No one’s prepared for the murderous group of people awaiting them, unmistakably targeting the Savages in retribution for a couple killed years ago. The family fights back, but while some make it home, they aren’t yet safe—one or more of the culprits is still alive. Despite the book being split into three sections, Roberts’ narrative is seamless, simply moving the frights back to New York and later a superyacht. Part 1, just over half the book, is the most invigorating. Family members/friends falling victim to brutal murders is merely the start: there’s also a mudslide-generating storm and tabloid sister-reporters determined to find dirt on Ed, a reputed philanderer. The second part follows suit, essentially a second wave of assaults, further delving into the baddies’ motive (possibly relevant to Ed’s wealthy dad, Nathan) and adding a new, more dangerous foe. The author only falters on the comparatively short final part, chock full of twists and revelations, which feels as if Roberts is speeding to the end, leaving too many unanswered questions in his wake. Nevertheless, characters boast riveting backgrounds, from Ed’s TV career consisting predominantly of hosting reality series to the reason Simon was at one point institutionalized.
Ruthless killers spark terrifying scenes throughout even if the ending remains a bit incomplete.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-53973-6
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Savage Roberts Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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