Despite the hints of a promising Hitchcock-ian thriller, this murder tale fails to live up to its potential.
Mysterious creatures and gruesome killings terrorize a New England town in this horror novel.
In 1964, a young boy is disemboweled in a storm drain under the Esker in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Rescuers fail to recover the boy’s body when it’s dragged off by a predator covered in seaweed with yellow eyes (“Stopping for a moment, the creature started to growl; a slow, deep growl that made the storm drain feel even colder than its concrete walls”). The image sticks with rookie firefighter Paul Tobin and seasoned Capt. Butch Hunt. Eleven years later, they experience an eerie sense of déjà vu when another boy goes missing. This time, the incident sets off a string of murders, each more horrific than the last. A park ranger is violently beaten and dragged from her vehicle. A young couple are ambushed and slaughtered, with nothing left but severed feet to attest to their presence. As the list of the missing and the dead grows, the firemen and Park Ranger Ryan Gallagher lead a dangerous search for the creature (or creatures) that hunts in the storm drains under the earth. Tracey (Tales from the Tables, 2014, etc.) has the makings of an excellent horror story. The initial murders are shocking, and the presence of an unknown entity lurking under a popular park is wonderfully disturbing. The first disappearance is wrought with tension as rescuers struggle to find a missing boy in the face of a howling storm and rising tides, with the young victim’s screams of pain echoing in their ears. But the book loses steam as the narrative progresses. What ensues is a litany of homicides that lacks emotional impact once the initial shock value of death wears off. There is little character development, resulting in a dearth of emotional connection to the victims or the rescue team. As the body count rises, the absence of a deeper plot becomes noticeable. Why the sudden killings? Is there something in the history of the town? There must be more to the story than a string of violent episodes. An abrupt ending and unexpected reveal leave more questions than answers, perhaps a nod toward an impending sequel or two.
Despite the hints of a promising Hitchcock-ian thriller, this murder tale fails to live up to its potential.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5464-1
Page Count: 150
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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