Readably bloody, gay lore galore, but regrettably lacking in gay humor.
Debut novel of a swank gay-vampire series set in Greenwich Village.
Jean-Luc Courbet, who bounds over tall buildings, has been around for more than 100 years and, in fact, attended the premiere of Moussorgski’s Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi in 1888, which he recalls while having a neck of a long drink in his box at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Opera. Jean-Luc is a towering snob (the Met is dowdy, American apartments are too squat to be graceful), though in the States he calls himself “Jack.” Just arrived on this shore, Jack takes up Village digs and cruises nightly for trim, well-built men, drinking them dry during their raptures as he sodomizes them. Though his beauty narcotizes his victims, we have a hard time warming up to this ice-cold hero, whose normal temperature gives his victims goose-bumps. Before setting forth each evening, with cowboy boots to give him extra height, Jack first sends forth his dark-winged spirit to scan Village streets for the victim whose blood will keep vampirism healthy in his ageless flesh. Nice facts about Jack: he stocks his apartment with food and toilet paper he never uses; his sebaceous glands secrete no oil, so he leaves no fingerprints; he makes love with sexy little nips and bites over an hour’s passage, the victim unaware of blood loss. The narrative darts about France and London in long italicized passages as we discover Jean-Luc’s origins: his mother, Noël Courbet, 14 when she gave birth to her bastard, went on to become France’s greatest actress before Bernhardt. Vastly rich (and blood-sucking) Phillipe de Charnac “turned” Noël, married her, then turned his stepson and became Jean-Luc’s lover before Noël murdered him. She spends the rest of the novel chasing Jean-Luc, intending to kill him as well. Jack, meanwhile, falls for frighteningly beautiful Claude Halloran. Will Jack turn Claude? Will Noël fry Jack?
Readably bloody, gay lore galore, but regrettably lacking in gay humor.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57566-764-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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