On leave from his skillful and successful military thrillers (The Med, The Gulf, The Circle), Poyer takes his readers to a ravaged corner of Pennsylvania where eco-despair, alcohol, and ruthless business practices make life miserable for everyone. Everyone. Attention Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: you are needed in northwestern Pennsylvania where Siberian weather, toxic dumping, spouse abuse, alcoholism, venereal disease, deforestation, adolescent violence, unemployment, and potholes have made the old oil-pumping town of Raymondsville into an American gulag. And it's getting worse. Loathsome, syphilitic businessman Brad Boulton—the illegitimate son of a coal-field prostitute who married into the town's leading family—is busily turning the nearly bankrupt local oil industry into a shady conglomerate. Boulton is the kind of guy who sees golden financial opportunities in defrocked doctors and bedridden pensioners for his new chain of cut-rate nursing homes. He's recently improved his cash-flow situation by filling emptied oil trucks with pesky toxic industrial waste (mob controlled, of course) from New Jersey, which he has his drivers dump along the roadsides of his own community. Animals are dying and people are getting sick. The demoralized townspeople, grateful for the jobs he's brought to their dying burg, will do anything Boulton wants. The only ones willing to stand up to him are his nasty wife, the electrolysis expert he's been seeing on the side, a crippled but clever schoolboy, and an ancient hard-as-nails hunter. The wife keeps to herself, but the other three get together on a homemade bomb, making good use of that oh-so-handy fertilizer you hear so much about these days. Unremittingly bleak.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-85421-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
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