The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just...
Novelist/actress/screenwriter Fisher offers a sequel to Postcards From the Edge (1987), with many of the same elements: another head-trip with a lost Hollywood soul—and drugs, drugs, drugs.
Since we last saw her, Suzanne Vale had married and had a child. Studio exec Leland was sweet, caring and great in bed; still, he left her three years ago . . . for a guy. So darling daughter Honey, now six, has become Suzanne’s focus, except when Suzanne is gigging as a cable talk-show hostess or sending little Honey off to Leland. But why must Leland have a much better TV, and regular folks for parents, in contrast to her own flaky showbiz mom? And how has she managed so long without sex? The drought ends with a successful play for Dean Bradbury (“Hollywood’s original bad boy”) at a producer’s funeral. The pair’s one-night stand is followed by a longer run with Thor, a towering blond who brings out the slut in Suzanne, which also means giving up the meds she needs for her bipolar whatever, which is when all hell breaks loose. Suzanne destroys her patio in the middle of the night, has her hair cut off, gets a tattoo, and drives to Tijuana with the tattoo artist. Okay, he’s an ex-con, but he’s loaded with OxyContins. Meanwhile, never a thought for Honey. Rescued by best friend Craig, Suzanne messes up her new meds and winds up in the nuthouse, not such a great change from the world outside: people continue to loom up out of the drug-spangled mists, and Suzanne’s just-kidding wordplay never stops, though receiving a secret message from an old movie on TV is a new low point. Eventually, Suzanne will be released into a happy ending: a kinda sorta reunion with Leland.
The satirical swipes at Tinseltown are missing here, apart from that funeral scene. The rest is all Suzanne, and she’s just not interesting enough to sustain the attention.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-684-80913-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
A treat for fans of The Evil Dead or Zombieland, complete with affordable solutions for better living.
A hardy band of big-box retail employees must dig down for their personal courage when ghosts begin stalking them through home furnishings.
You have to give it up for the wave of paranormal novels that have plagued the last decade in literature; at least they’ve made writers up their games when it comes to finding new settings in which to plot their scary moments. That’s the case with this clever little horror story from longtime pop-culture journalist Hendrix (Satan Loves You, 2012, etc.). Set inside a disturbingly familiar Scandinavian furniture superstore in Cleveland called Orsk, the book starts as a Palahniuk-tinged satire about the things we own—the novel is even wrapped in the form of a retail catalog complete with product illustrations. Our main protagonist is Amy, an aimless 24-year-old retail clerk. She and an elderly co-worker, Ruth Anne, are recruited by their anal-retentive boss, Basil (a closet geek), to investigate a series of strange breakages by walking the showroom floor overnight. They quickly uncover two other co-workers, Matt and Trinity, who have stayed in the store to film a reality show called Ghost Bomb in hopes of catching a spirit on tape. It’s cute and quite funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way until they run across Carl, a homeless squatter who's just trying to catch a break. Following an impromptu séance, Carl is possessed by an evil spirit and cuts his own throat. It turns out the Orsk store was built on the remains of a brutal prison called the Cuyahoga Panopticon, and its former warden, Josiah Worth, has returned from the dead to start up operations again. It sounds like an absurd setting for a haunted-house novel, but Hendrix makes it work to the story’s advantage, turning the psychological manipulations and scripted experiences that are inherent to the retail experience into a sinister fight for survival.
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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