The author of Horse Crazy (1989) chronicles the making of a movie in a fiction that self-consciously adapts a cinematic style— a strong visual sense, sharp dialogue, and a cast of instantly recognizable characters. The secondary players in this sinister drama alone suggest the decadent atmosphere. The Colombian set is peopled with freaks, fascists, multiple amputees, sexual degenerates, and other assorted sordid types—the perfect cast and location for a movie by German director Paul Grosvenor, only now emerging (in the early 80's) from under the jaunting shadow of his master, Rudolph Bauer, a Fassbinder-like maniac who overdosed on drugs. Using many of Bauer's company, Grosvenor begins shooting his strange film fueled more by coke and booze than a clear script. Among the cast: Alex Gavro, a ``discount-house Genet'' who also seems to be sleeping with his mother; Irma Irma, a ``boring malcontented'' cult star; Michael Simrad, a beautiful narcissist; and the narrator, a sometime actor whose face is badly scarred. ``Monsters on a rampage in a foreign country,'' this odd group engages in lots of kinky behavior, pushing things to the edge as the movie grows increasingly out of control. Meanwhile, a serial killer, who cannibalizes his victims, is on the loose in seedy Cartagena, preying only on tourists. Told with noir-like precision, this central narrative is framed by a gothic horror story told in the present—how AIDS has ravaged many of those involved with the film. Orgiastic sex no longer seems intriguing, just suicidal, though a gay sex scene at Dachau makes its political point a bit too heavily. Indiana's anti-American rhetoric (``a malignant tumor of a country'') risks drawing attention to itself in an otherwise brilliant portrayal of outlaw behavior, free of cant and aware of its own recklessness. A disturbing, vivid, and brutal novel that succeeds in its dizzy mix of genres and influences. Not for the prudish, though.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41888-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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