Despite a few moments of icky sentimentality, newcomer Boehm's fascinating subject matter, engaging cast, unerring prose,...
A witty, well-crafted fictional debut from an accomplished journalist, translator, and memoirist (A Zen Romance: One Woman's Adventures in a Monastery, 1996): eight stories, all set in contemporary Japan, that chronicle supernatural occurrences in the often-lonely lives of educated urbanites.
Postmodern retellings of the traditional Japanese ghost stories popularized in the West by fin de siècle journalist Lafcadio Hearn, these longish, plot-driven pieces are actually—aside from the paranormal episodes at the heart of them—tales of romance rather than the grisly stuff of Poe or Lovecraft. "Hungry Ghosts in Love," the centerpiece of the collection, concerns Josephine Stelle, a "third-generation travel writer [and] third-generation woman of passion" who spends every waking moment trying to live up to the standards set by her intrepid grandmother Leda, reputedly one of Pancho Villa's lovers, by jetting around the globe, writing insipid articles ("Cannibal Fashion," "Best Hotel Brunches of Waikiki") for Japanese English-language travel magazines, and engaging in brief, torrid affairs with unsuitable men. Attempting to avoid one particularly offensive paramour, she impulsively treks up to a mountainous region of Japan known as the Valley of Hell, where she falls in love with Gaki, a gorgeous priest who lives alone in an ancient little shrine. When she returns to her Kyoto home, Josephine discovers that gaki means "hungry ghost." In "The Samurai Goodbye," the funniest and most nightmarish story here, a young Ph.D. program dropout—and grandson of a legendary chronicler of Japanese lore, clearly modeled on Lafcadio Hearn—finds himself haunted by faceless demons.
Despite a few moments of icky sentimentality, newcomer Boehm's fascinating subject matter, engaging cast, unerring prose, and superb sense of voice make for a compelling read.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 4-7700-2531-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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