Slap-dash plotting, pedestrian prose, stick figure hero: a terminal case.
Medical thriller about a feckless young doctor in over the head he ought to have examined.
Take that whole risky business with Restore Tabs, for instance. Anyone playing with a full deck would have known the darn things were too good to be true. Wake up, heedless (if handsome) young Dr. Steven McClaren. Enhances breast size, increases sex drive, chases wrinkles—and that’s just for starters, he’s told. So there’s gullible Dr. Steve irresponsibly doing TV commercials for Ecolabs, the herb firm that makes and markets Restore Tabs—and he’s doing it simply because his old college buddy, the company’s CEO, has asked him to. In the meantime, that hot new miracle product, “the female Viagara,” has suddenly begun to cause vaginal bleeding in a goodly percentage of those persuaded to use it. Oh, mindless Dr. Steve. Equally ill-advised is his torrid affair with Ecolabs exec Francesca Taylor. Never mind that “bar none, she had the greatest body” he’d ever seen, the point is that only a dim bulb could have failed to spot her as a distaff Iago. And Dr. Steve pays a draconian price for the lust in his heart. Thanks to Francesca and her several co-conspirators, he’s bitten by a poisonous Australian jellyfish, nearly flattened by a charging Mercedes, knocked down, stabbed, and burnt out—escaping the flames that consume his house at the very last minute. Why are Francesca and friends in such a conspiratorial frenzy? A get-rich scam involving Restore Tabs seems to be at the heart of it, though it’s hard to be definitive when a plot becomes as muddled as this one. And also hard to care much when Dr. Steve muddles through this seventh try for physician/novelist Shobin (The Unborn, 1981, etc.).
Slap-dash plotting, pedestrian prose, stick figure hero: a terminal case.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26686-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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