A rich read most jackals will take kindly to.
Sequel at half the length to Simmons’s 1990 baggy-pants small-town Illinois childhood nostalgia fest, Summer of Night, told partly through the hovering spirit of Duane, an 11-year-old genius chewed to pieces by a corn combine 40 years ago.
Now disembodied, Duane sees the world through the eyes of childhood buddy Dale Stewart, who survived their elementary school’s haunted big Borgia Bell and some nasty, wildly betoothed, burrowing, nine-foot black eels. Lit professor Dale, who writes formulaic Jim Bridge: Mountain Man novels, leaves his Montana ranch—and a failed love affair with a grad student—on sabbatical and returns to the deserted McBride farm to write his first “serious” novel, which sounds much like Summer of Night without the horror. During a year of clinical depression, he’d written Internet editorials about Montana neo-Nazi skinheads, and now the Illinois skinheads are onto him. The McBride farm has disturbing qualities: the odor of some large dead thing, a sealed-off upstairs, a living room full of strange metal “learning boxes.” Simmons has an enjoyable time ringing in strong echoes of the earlier book, but mostly Simmons (like Dale Stewart) works toward a seriously well-written nonhorror novel, until we grow suspicious that we are into a deceptive tale much like the flicks The Sixth Sense and The Others, with a Jamesian ghost story overlay, wherein the everyday has an otherworldly reverse side. This makes A Winter Haunting hard to review without giving away its more subtle suspense elements. What’s more, Professor Stewart, now reading Swann’s Way and Seamus Heaney’s recent translation of Beowulf, finds his ThinkPad sending him warnings from Duane in Anglo-Saxon. Dale (not Dan Simmons, of course) complains about the “jackal piss” his reviewers squirt on him. Then big black dogs (his depression?) hound the farm and reality wavers—then really wavers.
A rich read most jackals will take kindly to.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-97886-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
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Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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