Vampirism is simply another obstacle for greedy and often indifferent characters in this irreverent story.
In this supernatural tale, a woman uses her new relationship with a vampire for a business opportunity—selling his blood as a face cream.
Twenty-eight-year-old Jessica Connors is happy to have escaped her Poughkeepsie, New York, roots to work at the Art Fool, a trendy SoHo gallery. She doesn’t care much for Don Meeker, in love with Jessica since high school, but the pendant he gives her is more her style: old but unmistakably valuable. The Gnostic cross also has an unintended consequence, attracting Cortes Del Lago, a vampire for more than a century. A lack of bodily functions—Cortes equates himself with a ghost—renders sex a pointless endeavor. But the vampire willingly shares his blood with Jessica, who reminds Cortes of his long-ago love, Molly O’Hara, and Jessica has no complaints once the regenerative blood hits her skin. She starts collecting it in test tubes and, with financing from gallery owner and Ukrainian billionaire Dimitri Garpov, plans on marketing it as a beauty cream. Detective John Paul Stratton, meanwhile, investigates murders linked by traces of reptile blood at the scenes. He has his theories (a death cult, perhaps?), but with victims tied to Jessica, he certainly thinks she did it—or had someone do it for her. Pollin (Thirty-Two Acres of Paradise: Varian Fry at Air-Bel, 2015, etc.) embraces some vampiric traditions, including blood sucking, stakes, and silver bullets. But a stream-of-consciousness narrative abandons a typical vampire plot. Jessica at a funeral, for example, has an inner debate that moves from various ways of mourning to her changing situation with Cortes, who may be turning human. The author retains this style through shifting perspectives, an accompanying interchangeability that unfortunately doesn’t offer characters much distinction. But Pollin wisely employs a good deal of humor to tackle quite a bit of heavy material, like gay artist Tancredo Zaru, whose genuine expression of spirituality is a potentially blasphemous sculpture, Plop Christ (it’s as gaudy as it sounds). Injecting so much comedy in the wry tale ensures that cynical views of religion and death are never outrightly offensive, and sequences like a tearful Molly correcting her dying love’s grammar are a hoot.
Vampirism is simply another obstacle for greedy and often indifferent characters in this irreverent story.Pub Date: March 21, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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