Far-out, fresh, and gripping. And better than the movie.
Wilson turns from medical thriller (Sims, 2003) to focus on a contagion of vampires.
The author has been writing about vampires since The Keep (1991), a bizarre bloodfest about an extermination squad of storm troopers sent to destroy monsters that were killing Nazis in a Transylvanian castle. This time, he takes off from his short story “Midnight Mass,” which was filmed from Wilson’s screenplay, released theatrically last July, and is already out on a DVD that’s gotten some of the most wretched reviews ever to appear on Amazon.com. So Wilson has apparently novelized his story from the screenplay. In his introduction, he calls it a pseudovampire novel, while he terms Midnight Mass the real deal, like Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot and not like the tales of tortured romantic aesthetes passing for vampires since King’s masterpiece. This one starts big: all of Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China and now Western Europe are overrun, while vampire conversions multiply geometrically. Starting with big Jewish sections of Brooklyn and Queens, the whole East Coast is lost as well. The US vampires tear off their victims’ heads to stop turnings and conserve their food population. Since Wilson’s story takes vampires seriously, it takes Catholicism seriously as well, making crucifixes and holy water fatal to vampies. Sister Carole Hanarty, of St. Anthony’s church in small but now largely deserted Lakewood, New Jersey, learns that the vampires hire “cowboys” to round up human cattle while promising them eternal life later on. Carole, forced to “rekill” undead Sister Bernadette, turns vigilante, cooks up some potassium chloride plastique bombs, and later joins with Father Joe Cahill and Joe’s lesbian niece Lacey, to form a vampire killer posse. The group liberates the Lakewood Post Office, where vampies sleep, then it’s off to the Empire State Building, with Carole wired as a suicide bomber, to kill Franco, the top vampire.
Far-out, fresh, and gripping. And better than the movie.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30705-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
