A ghoulish gem for those continuing—or new to—this series.
In this horror sequel, a Vermont town prepares to host a Goth festival and hopefully maintain a centuries-old secret.
It’s 1987, and 19-year-old Chris Chandler has been released from the South Portland Juvenile Detention Center in Maine. After the gruesome events in Bemishstock, ending with the death of Mallory Dahlman and others, he’s continuing as a Mortsafeman—one who defends “the departed.” A man named Bernard Monsegur has asked him to house-sit his Marymount estate in Lewis, Vermont. Chris does so readily, because the vicious ghost of Mallory has taken revenge on a fresh victim in Bemishstock and he’d like to avoid the questions of journalist Jackie Cormier. Though Lewis is a dying town, Mayor Gerald Paget sees it as a potential tourist destination that utilizes, among other attractions, the Monsegur family cemetery. Wealthy librarian Rose DuCalice, Bernard's sister, finds the enterprise grotesque and hopes to stop it. On the mayor’s side is Gilbert Burgoyne, who’s inherited the decrepit Bijou Burgoyne theater from his father and is planning to transform it into a playhouse featuring violent “Grand Guignol” performances. Gilbert also happens to finance his art by stealing and selling skeletons. When Chris gets caught among these powerful factions in Lewis, he’ll do anything to soothe Mallory’s ghost and reunite with the enchanting Gillian Willard. This second installment of Blake’s (Dead Scared, 2017) series is quite the gift, complete with a black bow, to horror fans. He juggles the Gothic New England ambiance, the parade of sleazy characters, and the occasional supernatural mauling with panache. Gilbert is misogyny incarnate, calling his girlfriend, Doloroso Morgana, Dolli, “the best sex doll in the world,” while Paget treats his daughter, Geraldine, like a nonentity. Mallory’s manifestations are uniquely chilling, as her “blue glow” becomes a “crackling and fizzing,” akin to a blown fuse. The author will also charm those who love well-researched history, working into the bedrock of his plot the Gnostic sect of European Cathars from the Middle Ages. In addition, strutting, memorable characters make this chiller unmissable.
A ghoulish gem for those continuing—or new to—this series.Pub Date: June 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77392-009-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: MuseItUp Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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