Strains so hard to be fun! sexy! cool! that it ends up being none of the above.
Two frustrated journalists decide that what the world needs is another vacuous magazine.
Can a book have a sense of fun and not be utterly, abysmally shallow at the same time? In this trifle from Entertainment Weekly scribe Rebecca Ascher-Walsh and Fortune editor Erik Torkells (the pair who make up the pseudonymous Tosh), the answer is a resounding no. Ascher-Walsh and Torkells’s stand-ins are Sam, who writes Hollywood profiles for an entertainment rag and Tom, the gay lifestyles editor at Profit magazine. He is chafing at the strictures of his job; she just got fired after false rumors circulated that she canoodled with Russell Crowe at a Hollywood party. Since this is not so much a novel as journalistic wish-fulfillment, the two of them dream up Bite, a high-calorie glossy magazine about, well, the usual celebrity/food/sex/fashion stuff, but even fluffier than what you’re accustomed to. Unfortunately, it takes Tosh far too long to get to this point, readers having to be assaulted first with pages and pages of Sam and Tom’s faux fabulous lives and wearying affairs of the heart. Once the magazine itself gets cranked up and a few more characters pop in to run the thing, the narrative picks up a bit of steam. But because there are seemingly no impediments to these bright young things—every article idea they throw at each other is proclaimed wonderful, and pretty much nothing stands in their way—there’s also precious little drama. What finally becomes so obnoxious is the arrogant pretense that its characters are doing something radical or even vaguely original, as though newsstands were filled with dowdy, gray-type journals on foreign affairs: “Even women’s fashion magazines were so serious—if Harper’s Bazaar ran one more piece about AIDS in Africa . . . Tom was going to puke.”
Strains so hard to be fun! sexy! cool! that it ends up being none of the above.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-7764-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Downtown Press/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge...
Posthumous work by the unflinching Lewis (The Second Suspect, 1998, etc.) offers a chilling glimpse inside the head of a young prostitute forsaken by family and lovers.
Living in an unnamed suburb in the well-appointed house of her absent parents, who seem to care not at all what she does, first-person narrator Nina (her professional name) begins to turn tricks in the parking lot of the local train station. Details emerge in nonchalant fashion, described in a deadpan voice. Nina has had some experience with drugs, and she’s been locked up, possibly for psychiatric reasons. Her actions, which at first seem innocent or helpless, soon turn needy and ugly. Then Nina meets the customer who decides her fate, a rough guy who takes her home to his fancy house (“going up the driveway seemed to take longer than getting there”) to meet his good-looking wife (“nothing suburban or matronly going on, which was a decided relief”). Rough trade turns to horrible as Nina is forced to witness the man’s sadistic treatment of his spouse before he turns on her. Shockingly, Nina comes back for more, motivated by true human sympathy for the wife. Ingrid’s self-loathing prompts Nina to stay with her and even to suggest that she try to make a break and get away. The two women begin a love affair that stirs the apparently influential husband to vengeance; he has Nina arrested, then incarcerated in solitary confinement, which probably would have lasted forever if not for the loving intervention her counselor and therapist, Beth. The story constantly piques your expectations, but the denouement is never assured, though you’re sure it will be gruesome and brutal. Despite her penchant for slurry colloquial sentence fragments, Lewis is an enormously compelling writer: astute, risky, and unapologetic.
Unsettling in its depiction of sadistic sex acts and hauntingly sad in its portrayal of a lonely soul tittering on the edge of emotional oblivion.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2004
ISBN: 1-85242-456-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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