Lovely, deeply felt fiction, with a subterranean vein of wry humor that helps make bearable even its most pained moments.
Irish writer Boylan (11 Edward Street, 1992, etc.) draws on painful family memories of her own father's manic-depression for a Dublin-set story of love, aging, madness, and the price of marriage.
Dick and Lily Butler, married for nearly 50 years, are the sort of doting, sweet, slightly dotty couple for whom buying and eating broccoli constitutes an adventure. Their only child, Ruth, is a hard-nosed feminist architect who can't quite see the magic in her parents' life or in their house "draped about with good feelings." The good feelings, though, dissipate and then shatter irretrievably when Dick begins to show signs of a slowly growing madness. He imagines intruders, schemers after his money, his home, his wife. Finally he explodes into utterly shocking violence, and Lily and Ruth are forced to have him committed. The crisis brings a new presence into their lives, an affable gay psychiatrist named Tim Walcott. As the disease makes its slow progress, Dick's manias become increasingly threatening and draw the few remaining family friends into their vortex. Suddenly, as if exhausted by the process, the old man dies, leaving his wife and daughter to cope with literal and figurative ghosts. In a superbly realized irony, each finds her way to a quiet and comfortable peace with his memory. Boylan tells this story with such delicacy and sound good sense that it's exhilarating to read even in its darkest and most agonizing moments. She is a deft technician with an ear for the offbeat, compelling metaphor, and a real feeling for human emotions, both pleasant and not.
Lovely, deeply felt fiction, with a subterranean vein of wry humor that helps make bearable even its most pained moments.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58243-096-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic "The Monkey's Paw"—a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here—as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the "Pet Sematary": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death—especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's "annex"—an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex—resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt—when dead Timmy Baterman was "transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?" Will Gage return to the living—but as "a thing of evil?" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise—and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0743412281
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK TO SCREEN
An extremely powerful story of a young Southern Negro, from his late high school days through three years of college to his life in Harlem.
His early training prepared him for a life of humility before white men, but through injustices- large and small, he came to realize that he was an "invisible man". People saw in him only a reflection of their preconceived ideas of what he was, denied his individuality, and ultimately did not see him at all. This theme, which has implications far beyond the obvious racial parallel, is skillfully handled. The incidents of the story are wholly absorbing. The boy's dismissal from college because of an innocent mistake, his shocked reaction to the anonymity of the North and to Harlem, his nightmare experiences on a one-day job in a paint factory and in the hospital, his lightning success as the Harlem leader of a communistic organization known as the Brotherhood, his involvement in black versus white and black versus black clashes and his disillusion and understanding of his invisibility- all climax naturally in scenes of violence and riot, followed by a retreat which is both literal and figurative. Parts of this experience may have been told before, but never with such freshness, intensity and power.
This is Ellison's first novel, but he has complete control of his story and his style. Watch it.
Pub Date: April 7, 1952
ISBN: 0679732764
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1952
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