A fine collection that imbues fantasy, action and horror with real literary depth.
Ghosts, monsters and trials at sea complicate romances in these energetic, atmospheric stories.
British Fantasy Society August Derleth Award–winner Brenchley provides deft sketches in a range of styles and settings—from age-of-sail adventure to modern urban realism, always with splashes of the supernatural and the macabre. Certain characters, themes and plot devices resonate throughout the collection. Several stories, for example, concern psychologically fraught vigils for dying men, held by friends and lovers, who experience spectral presences as subtle emanations of regret and spent passions. More rambunctious are a series of maritime yarns about a transhistorical figure named Sailor Martin, who plies the oceans from the 18th century, when he braves pirates, serial killers and sea creatures—including a bracing whale hunt worthy of Moby-Dick—to the present, when he copes with the inexplicable fritzing-out of radios and global positioning systems. In most of the stories, there’s also an amorous relationship involving an older, experienced, authoritative man who shepherds a slender, coltish youth—or, in one case, an entire floating brothel of such—through manly undertakings in and out of the sack. The erotic elements are sometimes hackneyed, as in a take on Dracula, in which the goth cheesiness culminates in pale boys sucking away at a man who seems less than horrified at their attentions. More convincing are quieter evocations of mature love, as when a man tends to his dying lover while fending off the mopey ghost of his uncle. Brenchley’s horror is most effective when it’s understated, a matter of half-seen apparitions and anxious disorientation; these build spookily to a shocking climax in a bravura tale of a man haunted by the ghost of a missing girl. Not every story is a masterpiece, but the author’s vigorous prose and well-paced storytelling will keep readers turning pages as his twisty characters get inside their heads.
A fine collection that imbues fantasy, action and horror with real literary depth.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1590215777
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Lethe Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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