A retelling of a well-known mystery that offers a few twists on the original.
A tour guide on the verge of retirement undergoes a haunting experience in this ghostly novel.
Raymond Smollet is giving his last tour of the Weatherlee Ghost House. He’s spent 30 years guiding visitors through the rambling home. Despite having lost his vision, he can still navigate the winding hallways and recite the rote stories. Smollet’s life is small and depressed; he lives alone with his cat and anticipates drinking himself to death after retirement. But his last tour of the Ghost House is an unexpected experience, as the blind man suddenly sees spirits everywhere. Sophia Weatherlee, the unbalanced heiress who insists on endless construction in the sprawling labyrinth of her home, appears in ballrooms and bedrooms. Her foreman, Chuck Ratowitz, struggles to respond to her unpredictable and constant demands while his personal life is falling apart. Smollet sees the house grow, witnesses a family dissolve, observes building disasters, and watches various servants and workers pass in and out of Sophia’s realm. It’s a horror story and a tragedy, with elements of romance and fantasy mixed in. This novel by Bishop and Fuller (co-authors: Galahad’s Fool, 2018, etc.) draws heavily from the chronicles of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, but employs different names and adds some backstory. Many of the details about the mansion, like removable floor panels, and the family, such as the death of Sophia’s daughter from marasmus, are pulled directly from the Winchester story. Smollet is whiny and condescending, an unlikable man who tends to expostulate too long on his sorry existence. His part of the tale feels unnecessary, as it’s the house, with its ghostly inhabitants, that is the true focus. The narrative surrounding Chuck and his wife and the subsequent unraveling of their lives is well written and engaging. Though the Winchester House did have a foreman who worked on the construction for 38 years, Chuck’s personal life and backstory are pleasant and unique contributions by the authors.
A retelling of a well-known mystery that offers a few twists on the original.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9997287-2-7
Page Count: 226
Publisher: WordWorkers Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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