A romp through mystery, science fiction and popular culture that will please readers looking for a smarter breed of fantasy.
A witty, fast-paced novel about a hack journalist and an unbelievable headline come to life.
Matthew Granger, a once-promising journalist living in the shadow of an illustrious father, travels around the rural news beats for the Fortean publication World News Explorer, looking for scoops on bat boys, Hitler’s heads and even the faintest insinuation of a UFO. Taylor renders the psychology of the younger Granger in an authentic, competent indirect discourse; Granger’s thoughts, observations and anxieties are at once charming and exasperating as his witty, keen consciousness charms readers to his side. Armed and cursed with a photographic memory, Granger is made an all-too keen observer of the most significant and trivial details of his stream of consciousness, but it’s this special ability that allows him to pierce the veil while rummaging through the gossip and local folklore of another backwater town with a tall tale to tell. Peppered throughout the opening passages of the novel are unsettling interludes of Granger’s experience in a room, vacillating between sensations of piercing light and darkness, until eventually it is revealed that these disjointed episodes are the calling cards of a personal abduction that he had previously treated as mere copy fodder. The novel remains true to its title and without breaking the carefully plotted suspension of disbelief, Granger uncovers the reality behind the panoply of abduction mythology without resorting to extraterrestrial vistas or campy cosmic journeys. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t wonderful elements of fantasy; his relationship with the creature Little One and Granger’s attempt to develop fluent telepathic communication are rendered with humor and insight as he finds Little One’s lack of extraverbal communication frustrating and intriguing. Taylor writes carefully and craftily in a story that pays homage to the absurdity and pathos at the heart of a culture that wishes crop circles were more than just pranks on a grand, if not cosmic, scale.
A romp through mystery, science fiction and popular culture that will please readers looking for a smarter breed of fantasy.Pub Date: May 18, 2011
ISBN: B0051P0OWI
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Kindle Edition
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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