Dark Tinseltown satire with more rage than laughs.
In this debut novel from screenwriter Ver Wiel, a burnt-out screenwriter plunges into the bizarro world of his own subconscious after ingesting a potent combination of over-the-counter sleep aids.
Estranged from his unfaithful movie-star wife and fixated on the woman he should have married, writer Morgan Beale holes up in a Sunset Strip hotel room ostensibly to work on the movie script of a popular comic novel called The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag. It is not going well. Hating himself almost as much as he hates the vapid Hollywood industry machine that made him a success, he numbs himself nightly with “the handshake,” a mixture of pills and red wine. It is during one bender that he “wakes up” to find himself in the middle of a nightmarish movie shoot. Literally stuck to his typewriter, the alienated 44-year-old watches helplessly as the novelist whose work he is adapting gets thrown into a fathomless pit by Armani-clad producer chimps from Hell. Luckily, Morgan is also reunited with his long-dead mentor Luke, a fellow scribe who has been transformed into a brave little Chihuahua. He and Luke team up with a group of ethnically diverse dwarves to battle the evil forces of modern celebrity-obsessed consumerist society. Really. In Morgan’s mind, these offenders include brainless morning talk-show hosts, talent-challenged reality-show wannabes, right-wingers and, of course, the titular java giant. During the wacky free-for-all (a robot, FEMA trucks and his wife all make appearances), he reminisces about his work and life, and especially the tragic lack of creativity in the movie business, while hoping for another chance. That is, if he ever wakes up. Ver Wiel’s debut burns with the righteous anger of a disillusioned insider; it would have benefited from more character development and a lighter hand.
Dark Tinseltown satire with more rage than laughs.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-868-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
The Stand did less well than The Shining, and The Dead Zone will do less well than either—as the King of high horror (Carrie) continues to move away from the grand-gothic strain that once distinguished him from the other purveyors of psychic melodrama. Here he's taken on a political-suspense plot formula that others have done far better, giving it just the merest trappings of deviltry. Johnnie Smith of Cleaves Mills, Maine, is a super-psychic; after a four-year coma, he has woken up to find that he can see the future—all of it except for certain areas he calls the "dead zone." So Johnnie can do great things, like saving a friend from death-by-lightning or reuniting his doctor with long-lost relatives. But Johnnie also can see a horrible presidential candidate on the horizon. He's Mayor Gregory Aromas Stillson of Ridgeway, N.H., and only Johnnie knows that this apparently klutzy candidate is really the devil incarnate—that if Stillson is elected he'll become the new Hitler and plunge the world into atomic horror! What can Johnnie do? All he can do is try to assassinate this Satanic candidate—in a climactic shootout that is recycled and lackluster and not helped by King's clumsy social commentary (". . . it was as American as The Wonderful Worm of Disney"). Johnnie is a faceless hero, and never has King's banal, pulpy writing been so noticeable in its once-through-the-typewriter blather and carelessness. Yes, the King byline will ensure a sizeable turnout, but the word will soon get around that the author of Carrie has this time churned out a ho-hum dud.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1979
ISBN: 0451155750
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1979
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It”...
Queen of the summer novel—how could she not be, with all her stories set on an island—Hilderbrand delivers a beguiling ninth (The Castaways, 2009, etc.), featuring romance and mystery on isolated Tuckernuck Island.
The Tate family has had a house on Tuckernuck (just off the coast of swanky Nantucket) for generations. It has been empty for years, but now Birdie wants to spend a quiet mother-daughter week there with Chess before Chess’s wedding to Michael Morgan. Then the unthinkable happens—perfect Chess (beautiful, rich, well-bred food editor of Glamorous Home) dumps the equally perfect Michael. She quits her job, leaves her New York apartment for Birdie’s home in New Canaan, and all without explanation. Then the unraveling continues: Michael dies in a rock-climbing accident, leaving Chess not quite a widow, but devastated, guilty, unreachable in the shell of herself. Birdie invites her younger daughter Tate (a pretty, naïve computer genius) and her own bohemian sister India, whose husband, world-renowned sculptor Bill Bishop, killed himself years ago, to Tuckernuck for the month of July, in the hopes that the three of them can break through to Chess. Hunky Barrett Lee is their caretaker, coming from Nantucket twice a day to bring groceries and take away laundry (idyllic Tuckernuck is remote—no phone, no hot water, no ferry) as he’s also inspiring renewed lust in Tate, who has had a crush on him since she was a kid. The author jumps between the four women—Tate and her blossoming relationship with Barrett, India and her relationship with Lula Simpson, a painter at the Academy where India is a curator, Birdie, who is surprised by the recent kindnesses of ex-husband Grant, and finally Chess, who in her journal is uncoiling the sordid, sad circumstances of her break with normal life and Michael’s death.
Hilderbrand’s portrait of the upper-crust Tate clan through the years is so deliciously addictive that it will be the “It” beach book of the summer.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-04387-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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