by Craig Spector ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005
Grisly fun for the fans.
Spector (To Bury the Dead, 2000, etc.) premises his latest horror novel on the moral dilemma of souls trapped in a Virginia mansion.
Seven rebellious kids at Stillson High call themselves the Underground to signal their disdain for the school’s “tidal pool of fractious cliques.” Come graduation, they sneak into historic Custis Manor for a beer bust. Among them: Justin Van Slyke, his beloved Mia Cheever, and Josh Custis, who has ties to the fabled old mansion. Fellow member Simon Baxter, feeling left out of the party, spikes their wine with ten tabs of LSD, and soon all are on a bad trip. Mia dies, apparently having fallen through a big mirror into another world. Justin tries to save her by going through the mirror, but it closes, severing his hand. Twenty years later, the remaining five regroup at Stillson Beach for news about their missing friends. Justin’s hand turns up at Custis Manor, and Chief Medical Examiner Elizabeth Bergen finds that it’s not only alive but has a pulse (the author’s best device). Flashback three centuries to Silas Custis, who buys a huge tract of prime Virginia land and imports slaves to work his plantation. One slave, Papa Josephus, survives endless whippings with no sign of pain; it turns out he’s the “Great Night, practitioner of a particularly vile and mysterious amalgam of African and Caribbean witchcraft.” So Silas joins Papa Josephus as an apprentice sorcerer and learns all sorts of ghastly stuff before he feels strong enough to boil up his mentor in the big stockpot for spells and himself become the Great Night. Time comes when Silas, age 167 but looking 60, chooses to murder his 800 slaves. Although he burns and boils them, their souls become locked up in the attic of Custis Manor. Now the five Undergrounders return to the manor and find themselves wandering through the very Underworld itself. Onward to a cosmic explosion, gigantic storm and fireworks.
Grisly fun for the fans.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-30660-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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