Violent, forceful sword-and-sandal adventure with a little Shakespearean tragedy around the edges.
In the fantasy realm of Vraniga, a paranoid warlord plans a genocidal march against perceived enemies while his rebellious general warns potential targets of impending danger.
Gleason (Ravagers, 2015) may remind heroic-fantasy readers of some of Robert E. Howard’s more brooding, less comic book–ish tales (and particularly the Kull the Conqueror cycle) with this first novel in a planned multivolume saga. The book has an intriguing story structure that starts with an introduction to a clan-village, where provincial dramas of hunting and falling in love are interrupted by the fearsome appearance of Mayodth, a four-armed Obnarm warrior. Mayodth warns he’s leading an army sent by a mad ruler named Deemuth, who aims to exterminate any settlement that lies in the path of his expanding empire. But Mayodth says that he has regrets about leading Deemuth’s bloodthirsty Noomok troops, and he now seeks allies to end the tyrant’s reign. The fact that he and Deemuth were once close friends is one of the twists in the central story, set in the past, about how Mayodth and Deemuth, who was orphaned and brutalized by a sadistic chieftain named Garmish, received help from Noomoks to escape from slavery. The vengeance-obsessed Deemuth later seized Garmish’s throne and degenerated into an equally cruel ruler over time, his ethnic-cleansing rampages encouraged by a pair of seductive concubines who warn him of assassins in his future. In the present, Mayodth seems intent on fulfilling these prophecies. Gleason generates some reader sympathy for the brutish Deemuth, a one-time victim doomed by circumstances to become a foul villain himself. The conspiracy to engineer his downfall becomes part of an overall moral fatalism that hangs over the sinewy narrative. An imaginative cast of beastlike characters is complemented by the humanlike Noomoks, whose culture possesses some characteristics of Native American tribes.
Violent, forceful sword-and-sandal adventure with a little Shakespearean tragedy around the edges.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5489-3118-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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