Typically creepy and graphic fare from Masterton, with an environmental spin that may herald a new direction (Drought,...
Twin forests on two continents seem to be haunting visitors and making them want to kill themselves.
Jack Wallace, widowed owner of a Polish restaurant in Chicago, receives some terrible news about his son Sparky’s closest friend, Malcolm. On a Boy Scout trip he took to faraway Owasippe Scout Reservation, all the Scouts and Scout leaders evidently killed themselves. Jack is shocked by this news and even more shocked that it’s not news to Sparky, who seems to have known it would happen. Although Sparky has always been a bit quirky, Jack puts much of that down to his Asperger’s diagnosis. Now, however, Sparky is consulting star charts and trying to predict the future. The two leave Chicago with Malcolm’s mother to claim the body and try to find some answers, but the forest reservation spooks them, and they’re troubled by the persistent sense that there’s something more in the woods. A séance Jack’s neighbor insists he attend connects him to a spectral voice (his dead wife?) that eventually connects him—as usual in Masterton, the logical steps are never very clear—to Dr. Krystyna Zawadka, who’s been investigating a disturbingly similar phenomenon in Poland. As Jack and Sparky travel abroad to find out if the danger is animal, human or something more, Sparky makes hauntingly accurate predictions along the way. One thing remains clear: Whoever sets foot in these forests is in grave danger, even from their own hands, until the truth can be found.
Typically creepy and graphic fare from Masterton, with an environmental spin that may herald a new direction (Drought, 2014). Given the final acts, this one clearly won’t be a series.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8344-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
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
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