Straightforward fantasy tales showcasing diverse forms of alleged justice.
Dean’s (Cryptic, 2016, etc.) short story collection explores the darker—and supernatural—side of the American judicial system through the centuries.
The opening tale, “Witch Tryals (1692),” like the three stories that follow it, begins in familiar terrain. Puritans in the late 17th century are accusing people of witchcraft and sentencing them to death. But the witches in Salem Town, who practice “white magic,” mete out their own brand of justice against those who commit perjury to ensure wrongful convictions. “Judge and Jury,” the longest story, is set in the Old West in 1881. In it, Dr. Donovan encounters robbers on his way to the lawless town of Canyon Diablo, Arizona. The town’s new sheriff, Sam Canton, saves him and throws one of the outlaws in jail—but members of his notorious gang are intent on breaking him out. Fortunately, Donovan has a strange device of his own design to combat them—even beyond death. “The Devil Made Me Do It!” follows the televised 1978 trial of Derrek Wagner, who declares that he murdered people at the devil’s command—but a surprise witness may counter that claim. In the near-future world of “The Wheel,” a new, particularly savage form of capital punishment may well steer some from lives of crime. Dean ably tackles serious issues throughout this collection, from religious persecution to kangaroo courts. The no-frills prose not only maintains a steady pace for each story, but also effectively grounds the supernatural components, making someone returning from the dead, for example, seem plausible. Likewise, Dean takes time in establishing his characters. Defense attorney Barry Palmer is a relatively minor player in “The Wheel,” for instance, but the author deepens his portrayal, showing him to be a lawyer with a high success rate who’s likely facing a losing case. Despite the stories’ horrific elements, they’re neither graphic nor excessively violent.
Straightforward fantasy tales showcasing diverse forms of alleged justice.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5447-6436-8
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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