Hollywood made the right decision.
Six pseudo-sci-fi screenplays in short-story form.
The first five of these cinematic stories follow an all-too-common Hollywood formula: An ordinary citizen is confronted with an inexplicable problem or power. “Stream,” for example, deals with the apocalyptic crisis that results from an alternate astral plane sucking away the souls of Earthlings. One man can save them all, but only if he is projected to an energy stream within the plane. In “Heaven’s Door,” a prosperous communication business connects the living world with Heaven. When people find out that they can speak not only with their loved ones, but also with God, demand for the service skyrockets–though unfortunately, those conversations have greater consequences. Deadly, Gremlin-like creatures take over the small town of Rockville, Colo., in “Nightlings,” sending college students Josh and Troy on a battle for their community. In “Tex and Kate,” two aging country heroes stumble upon a fountain of youth, though their second chance comes rife with complications. Morris, the hero of “In Your Dreams,” who has always been lost in his own subconscious, discovers that he is able to interact with other people’s dreams. In the final story, “Southern Fried Yankees,” the author departs from his tired formula and fondly remembers a summer that he and his brother spent with their grandmother in southern Missouri during the 1960s. This realistic story is far more effective than the other five, in which Young ceaselessly recycles the same hokey Hollywood clichés. While books often make good movies, the opposite is rarely the case. The pseudo-cinematic tone is childish, the characters are flat and the condensing of full screenplays into short stories makes them feel rushed and unfinished.
Hollywood made the right decision.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-9774328-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more recently as a feminist's Robinson Crusoe, this somber classic from prize-winner Haushofer chronicles the experiences of a (nameless) woman cut off from her familiar city ways in a remote hunting lodge, after Armageddon has snuffed out all life in the world beyond. With the woman's diary of activities during the first two years of isolation as foundation, the story assumes the shape and flavor of a journal. Saved from instant death by a transparent, apparently indestructible wall enclosing a substantial area of forest and alpine meadow, the woman finds relief from her isolation in companionship offered by a dog, a cat, kittens, and a cow and her calf, making them into a family that she cares for faithfully and frets over incessantly with each season's new challenges. Crops of potatoes, beans, and hay are harvested in sufficient quantity to keep all alive, with deer providing occasional meat for the table, but the satisfaction of having survived long winters and a halcyon summer is undone by a second sudden and equally devastating catastrophe, which triggers the need in her to tell her story. Although heavy with the repetition of daily chores, the account is also intensely introspective, probing as deeply into the psyche of the woman as it does into her world, which circumstances have placed in a new light. Subtly surreal, by turns claustrophobic and exhilarating, fixated with almost religious fervor on banal detail, this is a disturbing yet rewarding tale in which survival and femininity are strikingly merged. Not for macho readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-939416-53-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured...
Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff.
It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” to Lilly’s niece and ward Maude, a “simple, natural” innocent who will be married off to “Mr. Rivers,” then disposed of in a madhouse, while the conspirators share her wealth. Maidservant and mistress grow unexpectedly close, until Gentleman’s real plan—a surprise no reader will see coming—leads to a retelling of events we’ve just witnessed, from a second viewpoint—which reveals the truth about Mr. Lilly’s bibliomania, and discloses to a second heroine that “Your life was not the life that you were meant to live.” (Misdirections and reversals are essential components of Waters’s brilliant plot, which must not be given away.) Further intrigues, escapes, and revelations climax when Susan (who has resumed her place as narrator) returns from her bizarre ordeal to Mrs. Sucksby’s welcoming den of iniquity, and a final twist of the knife precipitates another crime and its punishment, astonishing discoveries about both Maude and Susan (among others), and a muted reconciliation scene that ingeniously reshapes the conclusion of Dickens’s Great Expectations.
Nobody writing today surpasses the precocious Waters’s virtuosic handling of narrative complexity and thickly textured period detail. This is a marvelous novel.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2002
ISBN: 1-57322-203-8
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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