Many will fade early—and miss the immensely funny, weird-ass, bottom-dog East Texas dialogue that carries us over the dense...
Horror whose joys enter from the eye’s edge, demanding, Read me twice, read me twice.
As page five tells, etymologically eschatology, or the study of last things, means to read schat—which is why the expletive “shit” litters these pages. Searcy’s debut, Ordinary Horror (2001), asked for a patient reader, one who could strip each phrase for the riddle beneath. Nothing has changed. The only true way to review Searcy is to quote him at length and let him either sell or hang himself, since his writing offers mandarin hardships not all wish to face. Even so, here is the plot, seen through a page darkly: Revelation is coming to East Texas, the biblical revelation, although the gorgeous symbolism of Revelations is easier to follow than Searcy’s darting shadows. Weird scarecrows, if that’s what they are, pop up all over Sulphur Springs. Luther (“Oh shit”) Hazlitt comes home to his banged-up trailer, finds his cattle fled, puppies gone, power out, fridge warm, dead chicken in the yard, and a set of clothes hanging from a tree as if the owner had been jerked out of them. His chow bites him on the forearm. His graying girlfriend Agnes tells him they’re getting baseball hail in Sulphur Springs. Sheriff Bobby shows off his biblical Leviathan, a 300-pound catfish, at Joe’s Big Juicy Hamburger Restaurant. Crazy humid weather gets people to praying in the streets, talking about Last Things—the Rapture! More animals die. A child disappears. Something lurks about Luther’s henhouse and trailer, so Luther builds a big trap to catch it. Can it be the Holy Spirit? Then Sheriff Bobby gets messily, fatally cut up—by whom? And when the trap fails, Luther turns his trailer into a really big spring-hinged trap. As with Ordinary Horror, Searcy’s climax has its hints but will leave most readers hanging. What? What?
Many will fade early—and miss the immensely funny, weird-ass, bottom-dog East Texas dialogue that carries us over the dense prose.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03132-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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