First-novelist Ellis savagely dissects southern social-climbing as it warps the lives of three Alabama girls. It’s clear from the start that there will be no holds barred: in chapter one, at her daughter’s Sweet Sixteen party, Mrs. Summers gets Sarina Summers drunk and smashes the girl’s crooked pinkie fingers with an ax handle’so that the doctor will be forced to fix Sarina’s single less-than-perfect attribute. Mrs. Summers is determined that Sarina will make up for her own divorce and long-ago failure to get into the exclusive Tri Delta sorority at the University of Alabama. Equally obsessed is Mrs. Hicks, the Summers family’s neighbor in an exclusive residential area called Cheshire, whose own efforts to make daughter Nicole the belle of Tuscaloosa are stymied by Nicole’s increasingly pathological love for Sarina. Bitty Jack Carlson, though, is from another world entirely; her parents do maintenance and laundry at Camp Chickasaw in impoverished Summons County, where Tuscaloosa’s elite send their kids for the summer. Nothing but trouble emerges from the three family’s interactions, beginning when 13-year-old Sarina falsely accuses Bitty Jack’s father of molesting her. During college years, well-connected but nerdy Stewart Steptoe becomes a bone of contention between sorority queen Sarina and scholarship student Bitty Jack, while Nicole (who has definitively blown her chances at Tri Delta by chopping off her mother’s ring finger) skulks in the background. Ellis depicts the cruelty of Tuscaloosa’s ingrown social scene with plenty of bite, and her gothic plot twists keep the story moving at a brisk clip. But her severely damaged characters prompt detached sympathy rather than emotional engagement, and the comedy is so black that only the toughest readers are likely to laugh. The hyperbolic denouement dismayingly implicates the only protagonist who seemed to have a chance at escaping this morally repugnant universe. Flawed, but still an impressive debut from a writer who may do even better next time, now that she’s vented some spleen.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86440-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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