Despite frequently giving into thriller clichés, a story notable for the decline of its sinister, once-harmless villain.
Storm’s (Reaper’s Gate, 2013) novel traces the hunt to find an unlikely serial killer.
After FBI agent Melvin Gibson—“not a model agent by any measure”—crashes a boat in Florida while in hot pursuit of a suspect, he and his loyal partner, Khoren, are reassigned to Chicago. Though they’re highly disappointed by the move, little do they know that a terrifying criminal awaits in the Windy City. Mild-mannered Evan Felder may seem like a perfectly average citizen with his wife, kids and house in the suburbs, but when a series of headaches reveals a brain tumor, his life changes forever. As Evan becomes tormented with constant pain, he withdraws from the familiar world around him and focuses instead on committing grisly murders. Targeting homosexuals (for reasons explained later), once-harmless Evan not only kills but mutilates his victims. With his twisted audacity garnering media attention, the hunt is on for the killer known as the Mantis—“the body of the victim had appeared as though a giant Mantis had gotten hold of the body and feasted on the fleshy parts.” Embodying much of the standard rebel-cop fare, Gibson is an agent who gets results even if he has to ruffle a few feathers along the way: “Bullshit! Special Agent Gibson, must I remind you that you work for me and the Bureau?” While his pursuers don’t offer much in the way of novel police characters, what keeps the search for the Mantis lively is Evan’s descent into madness. Never one to settle, he searches for new victims and new ways to shock the public, calling for even more swiftness from the forces trying to stop him. Though Evan isn’t as clever as Hannibal Lecter, they share a sense of depravity and self-confidence, making Evan a memorable villain, especially since he appears to be “the poster-child for ‘Mr. Average America.’ ”
Despite frequently giving into thriller clichés, a story notable for the decline of its sinister, once-harmless villain.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0985122881
Page Count: -
Publisher: Second Chance Publications
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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