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ESKER

Name: ESKER
Author: D.L. Tracey
ISBN: 978-1-5246-5464-1

by D.L. Tracey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 15, 2016

Despite the hints of a promising Hitchcock-ian thriller, this murder tale fails to live up to its potential.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.