The requisite blood-fest finale notwithstanding, a polished work of suspense.
Camp counselors run amuck in Lehmann-Haupt’s chilling second novel (following A Crooked Man, 1995), set in a rustic 1950s Pennsylvania boys’ camp.
This nicely handled thriller is narrated by 17-year-old Jerry Muller, the product of divorced parents, who returns to his beloved Camp Seneca as a junior counselor in the summer of 1952. Jerry takes with him his eager, impressionable nine-year-old half-brother, Peter, whom he must take care of in order to show his father and new stepmother how responsible he is. Unnerving changes have occurred at the camp, however, involving the arrival of Native American Buck Silverstone, aka Redclaw, who has been given free reign by the camp owners to scare the kids. (He begins by telling a campfire ghost story about a mad cook of a lodge in nearby Lake Pymatuning who wields a meat cleaver.) Buck claims the camp land is actually Seneca land, haunted by ghosts buried there, and subscribes to a hybrid religion embracing torture and mutilation. In the camp’s spirit of building character, Buck instigates several nasty scares, some of them turning violent. Jerry, who is still on crutches after breaking a leg in a skiing accident, acts as a kind of wary observer, and writes his reservations about the camp to his young German stepmother, Karla. Additional tension stems from issues related to class (Jerry is wealthy and educated, while the majority of campers are working class) and sex (Jerry’s male friend makes unwelcome advances).
The requisite blood-fest finale notwithstanding, a polished work of suspense.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-684-83427-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.
Spartan prose for a Spartan tale of badlands justice set in North Dakota and eastern Montana in the fall of 1951.
Watson’s writing (American Boy, 2011, etc.) is the principal pleasure here. The story is simple, ageless. Margaret Blackledge wants her grandson, Jimmy, back in Dalton, N.D. Daughter-in-law Lorna, her husband dead, has hooked up with the suave Donnie Weboy. Weboys are clannish, violent. Margaret appears prepared to undertake this adventure alone. Her husband, George, former sheriff, strong and silent, not quite the man he used to be, agrees to come. They set off in their old car, period details used sparingly, to wrest from a mother her child, to preserve a family broken by circumstance and hardship, to tempt fate. Grief has marked this fool’s errand from the outset—indelibly. To call the voice that narrates this novel omniscient is accurate only in so far as it describes the fictional convention. We hear an uninflected human voice that knows the outcome of this dark tale and tales like it. No one we meet, and no action taken, is beyond the expected conventions of a bleak American West: “[I]f I never hear again about what’s hard for a man, it’ll be too goddamn soon.”
The sort of book that puts the shine back on genre as an adjective to describe fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-57131-102-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This disappointing second novel from the author of Memory of Departure (1988) never quite gets off the ground, although the language is simple and appealing. The setting is precolonial north Africa. At the age of 12, Yusuf is taken away from his home by Aziz, a rich merchant, in payment for a debt of his father's. What follows is a series of events and episodes: Yusuf works in Aziz's shop alongside Khalil, a friendly and talkative young man who tells Yusuf he is also working to pay off his father's debts, although his father is dead; Yusuf is suddenly summoned to go on a journey ``to the interior''; Yusuf is left in the care of a couple who work him very hard; Yusuf is collected again by Aziz for a long and difficult journey. During their travels many men grow ill, and there are the expected hardships of life on the road with a caravan. There is much talk of the encroaching Europeans and a good deal of sexual teasing of Yusuf, whose physical beauty makes him an object of desire. But the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Because Yusuf is young and naive, and the narrative—while in the third person—cleaves close to his impressions, it's never exactly clear what's happening. Larger cultural issues, and the setting itself, are difficult to see through the forest of minutiae.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56584-162-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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