Following Fortnight of Fear (not reviewed), a second volume of 14 horror stories, few distinguished, by Britain's Masterton, who has 25 horror novels to his name. Each tale here takes the reader to a different city in Europe or the US, and each has a gripping germ that too often grows into nothing of great interest. ``Egg'' has a fabulous premise: A reclusive young Londoner finds a squeaking, fully formed human baby in the shell of his boiled breakfast egg. But from this wonderful thought (what Swift or Lewis Carroll would have done with it!), Masterton can wring only clichÇs. An American widower, in ``The Gray Madonna,'' revisits Bruges, where his wife was thrown into a canal by a nun in a gray habit. The reader soon figures out that the gray nun was actually a vengeful statue come to life, and that, unsurprisingly, she will now turn her attention to the widower. In ``J.R.E. Ponsford,'' a boy at Harrow is bullied constantly until the school's great cricket hero returns from the dead to avenge the lad. In ``Voodoo Child,'' the zombie of Jimi Hendrix returns 20 years after his death to the flat he died in, in Sussex, to recover his lost inspirational voodoo doll. Meanwhile, a Boston surgeon who specializes in organ transplants is hired by an immensely wealthy young wife to swell her sexuality with several extra vaginas (``Sex Object''); a Cliveden surgeon assembles for himself a new wife from six different women, updating her as the decades require (``Mother of Invention''); a Connecticut woman has an erectile bed that has absorbed 17 men and can service her (``Bridal Suite''); and the erotic Moroccan story ``The Jajouka Scarab'' follows the fate of a couple who discover that blistering orgasms can be gained by inserting a beetle up the male urethra during sex. A story set in San Francisco, puffed on the jacket, is not here. Too bad, since it sounds like the best.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7278-4741-4
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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