Cheer for every author who didn’t make the Modern Library’s Top 100, or even a single publisher’s acceptance pile: somebody has declared open season on Britain’s most undeservedly successful novelists. Amazonia Skreen doesn’t see why her own heartfelt fictional outpourings should have been rejected by the same publishers who trumpeted the rubbish of hacks like Adam Appleton, that delicate aesthete who also ghostwrote pornography on the side, or of Mick Roper, the pop singer who probably couldn’t even read the best-selling books issued under his name. Aided by her brawny, monosyllabic sidekick Tup Maul (whose hopeful response to each successful homicide is “Love now?”), she stages elaborately moralizing death scenes for Adam, Mick, and a bevy of other literary types: the self-merchandising success-story whose books are sold at his own coffeeshops; the half-anonymous co-dependent pair Amazonia intends to bring even closer in death; the crypto-fascist ranter of the roman-Ö-clef—all of them so excruciatingly familiar that it’s a pleasure to see the whole lot get their sanguinary comeuppance, especially at the hands (etc.) of the exotic and uninhibited Amazonia. The conceit is so appealing (the Modern Library meets House of Wax, with Sharon Stone in the Vincent Price role), and newcomer Rees is so obviously having a good time, that it seems both stuffy and reckless to complain that the plot device he’s chosen to add momentum and suspense to his series of Dantesque set-pieces(bad-hat Jack Jackson takes over the life of his twin brother, successful author David Jackson, when David succumbs to a miscalculated bout of erotic autoasphyxia, thereby unwittingly placing himself in all the peril David escaped by his timely demise) is so much less interesting than Amazonia’s gleefully lethal swipes at the literary establishment that you can hardly wait for the avenger to add this poseur’s scalp to her collection. An upscale black-comic equivalent of beach reading.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7472-5721-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
None
This is a book which courts the dangers of two extremes. It can be taken not seriously enough or, more likely, critical climate considered, too seriously. Kesey's first novel is narrated by a half-Indian schizophrenic who has withdrawn completely by feigning deaf-muteness. It is set in a mental ward ruled by Big Nurse — a monumental matriarch who keeps her men in line by some highly original disciplinary measures: Nursey doesn't spank, but oh that electric shock treatment! Into the ward swaggers McMurphy, a lusty gambling man with white whales on his shorts and the psychology of unmarried nurses down to a science. He leads the men on to a series of major victories, including the substitution of recent issues of Nuggetand Playboyfor some dated McCall's. The fatuity of hospital utilitarianism, that alcohol-swathed brand of idiocy responsible for the custom of waking patients from a deep sleep in order to administer barbiturates, is countered by McMurphy's simple, articulate, logic. This is a thoroughly enthralling, brilliantly tempered novel, peopled by at least two unforgettable characters. (Big Nurse is custom tailored for a busty Eileen Heckert.) Though extension is possible, make no mistake about it; this is a ward and not a microcosm.
None NonePub Date: Feb. 1, 1962
ISBN: 0451163966
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1961
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop...
A convicted murderer who may be a latter-day Messiah wants to donate his heart to the sister of one of his victims, in Picoult’s frantic 15th (Nineteen Minutes, 2007, etc.).
Picoult specializes in hot-button issues. This latest blockbuster-to-be stars New Hampshire’s first death-row inmate in decades, Shay Bourne, a 33-year-old carpenter and drifter convicted of murdering the police officer husband of his employer, June, and her seven-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Eleven years later Shay is still awaiting execution by lethal injection. Suddenly, miracles start to happen around Shay—cell-block tap water turns to wine, an AIDS-stricken fellow inmate is cured, a pet bird and then a guard are resurrected from the dead. Shay’s spiritual adviser, Father Michael, is beginning to believe that Shay is a reincarnation of Christ, particularly when the uneducated man starts quoting key phrases from the Gnostic gospels. Michael hasn’t told Shay that he served on the jury that condemned him to death. June’s daughter Claire, in dire need of a heart transplant, is slowly dying. When Shay, obeying the Gnostic prescription to “bring forth what is within you,” offers, through his attorney, ACLU activist Maggie, to donate his heart, June is at first repelled. Practical obstacles also arise: A viable heart cannot be harvested from a lethally injected donor. So Maggie sues in Federal Court to require the state to hang Shay instead, on the grounds that his intended gift is integral to his religious beliefs. Shay’s execution looms, and then Father Michael learns more troubling news: Shay, who, like Jesus, didn’t defend himself at trial, may be innocent.
Clunky prose and long-winded dissertations on comparative religion can’t impede the breathless momentum of the Demon-Drop plot.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7434-9674-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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