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ANIMALS

Name: ANIMALS
Author: Don LePan
ISBN: 978-1-59376-277-3

by Don LePan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2010

An awkward hybrid, with an overly oblique message, but it has its moments.

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Cannibalism is standard First World practice in this debut novel, a futuristic satire whose target is today’s factory farming.

It’s the early 22nd century, and yurn (human flesh) is on every menu. LePan’s novel moves forward on two tracks. There’s the story proper, about a victim and his two families; and then there’s a didactic essay by one Broderick Clark, which provides context for the victim’s horrifying ordeal. How humans came to eat their own flesh has two explanations. The first is economic. After the so-called great extinctions of farm animals, caused by disease, demand arose for another protein-rich food source. Supply was at hand. Little by little, the handicapped came to be seen as subhuman; this shift in perception explains our willingness to eat them. They were renamed mongrels. The cute ones became family pets, to replace disappeared cats and dogs. The rest became chattels on special farms; around age nine, they would be harvested (slaughtered). Which brings us to little Sam, born deaf into a poor family. His loving, distraught mother is forced to leave him on the porch of a better-off family, whose only child, Naomi, insists they adopt him as a pet. All goes well until her mother Carrie, alarmed by Naomi’s close involvement with the creature, pays a facilitator to take him off their hands. After that it’s the chattel farm, where Sam’s fate is sealed. There is suspense and pathos in his story, but periodically we are jerked back to Broderick’s overview, a clever pastiche of a footnoted academic paper. A more skillful writer would have integrated the essay and narrative. As LePan makes clear in the afterword, the barbaric conditions in the chattel pens mirror today’s factory farms, though the attraction/repulsion of human flesh-eating distracts from his propagandist’s point that our solicitude for pets and wild animals should encompass farm animals too.

An awkward hybrid, with an overly oblique message, but it has its moments.

Pub Date: June 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-59376-277-3

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Soft Skull Press

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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WITHOUT FAIL

From the Jack Reacher series , Vol. 6

by Lee Child ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping...

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When the newly elected Vice President’s life is threatened, the Secret Service runs to nomadic soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher (Echo Burning, 2001, etc.) in this razor-sharp update of The Day of the Jackal and In the Line of Fire that’s begging to be filmed.

Why Reacher? Because M.E. Froelich, head of the VP’s protection team, was once a colleague and lover of his late brother Joe, who’d impressed her with tales of Jack’s derring-do as an Army MP. Now Froelich and her Brooks Brothers–tailored boss Stuyvesant have been receiving a series of anonymous messages threatening the life of North Dakota Senator/Vice President–elect Brook Armstrong. Since the threats may be coming from within the Secret Service’s own ranks—if they aren’t, it’s hard to see how they’ve been getting delivered—they can’t afford an internal investigation. Hence the call to Reacher, who wastes no time in hooking up with his old friend Frances Neagley, another Army vet turned private eye, first to see whether he can figure out a way to assassinate Armstrong, then to head off whoever else is trying. It’s Reacher’s matter-of-fact gift to think of everything, from the most likely position a sniper would assume at Armstrong’s Thanksgiving visit to a homeless shelter to the telltale punctuation of one of the threats, and to pluck helpers from the tiny cast who can fill the remaining gaps because they aren’t idiots or stooges. And it’s Child’s gift to keep tightening the screws, even when nothing’s happening except the arrival of a series of unsigned letters, and to convey a sense of the blank impossibility of guarding any public figure from danger day after highly exposed day, and the dedication and heroism of the agents who take on this daunting job.

Relentlessly suspenseful and unexpectedly timely: just the thing for Dick Cheney’s bedside reading wherever he’s keeping himself these days.

Pub Date: May 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-399-14861-2

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.