Clarke gives us a tortured antihero, a disturbingly self-aware man we might not root for but cannot forget.
A man struggles to navigate his life after a stay in a behavioral rehabilitation center in this character-driven novel.
Clarke’s third novel, set years before the events of Vernon Downs (2014), returns the reader to the world of Charlie Martens, a self-described “easy-going” man who will “tend toward violence, if provoked.” After his parents’ deaths, Charlie spent his childhood with various relatives in Denver, Santa Fe, Rapid City, San Diego and, finally, Phoenix, where he emancipated himself. “I am not a good person,” Charlie writes in the first sentence of the entrance essay to rehab that opens the book. As if intent on proving this claim, Charlie relives everything from kissing Erica Ryan on the playground in fifth grade to the more recent and far more egregious sexual aggression and physical abuse that brought him to the Sonoran Rehabilitation Center. The gruesome details of his journal entries and essays force the reader to confront his capacity for cruelty along with him and could easily offend sensitive readers. But some slivers of hope still glimmer in the background. His relationship with Jenny, a Mormon and his high school sweetheart, is a brief ray of pure goodness that, though shattered, has a lasting impact on his obsessive and idealistic views of romance. While Charlie is—undoubtedly—not a good person, his appeal for sympathy and nonjudgment is warranted. As he states in the close of that opening essay: “You have to feel something to understand it.”
Clarke gives us a tortured antihero, a disturbingly self-aware man we might not root for but cannot forget.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9858812-8-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Roundabout Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Part of Hoffman's great talent is her wonderful ability to sift some magic into unlikely places, such as a latter-day Levittown (Seventh Heaven, 1990) or a community of divorcÇes in Florida (Turtle Moon, 1992). But in her 11th novel, a tale of love and life in New England, it feels as if the lid flew off the jar of magic—it blinds you with fairy dust. Sally and Gillian Owens are orphaned sisters, only 13 months apart, but such opposites in appearance and temperament that they're dubbed ``Day and Night'' by the two old aunts who are raising them. Sally is steady, Gillian is jittery, and each is wary, in her own way, about the frightening pull of love. They've seen the evidence for themselves in the besotted behavior of the women who call on the two aunts for charms and potions to help them with their love lives. The aunts grow herbs, make mysterious brews, and have a houseful of—what else?—black cats. The two girls grow up to flee (in opposite directions) from the aunts, the house, and the Massachusetts town where they've long been shunned by their superstitious schoolmates. What they can't escape is magic, which follows them, sometimes in a particularly malevolent form. And, ultimately, no matter how hard they dodge it, they have to recognize that love always catches up with you. As always, Hoffman's writing has plenty of power. Her best sentences are like incantations—they won't let you get away. But it's just too hard to believe the magic here, maybe because it's not so much practical magic as it is predictable magic, with its crones and bubbling cauldrons and hearts of animals pierced with pins. Sally and Gillian are appealing characters, but, finally, their story seems as murky as one of the aunts' potions—and just as hard to swallow. Too much hocus-pocus, not enough focus. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14055-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK TO SCREEN
Twenty New England horror shorts by Stephen King (and a painfully lofty introduction by old pro John D. MacDonald). King, of course, is the 30-year-old zillionaire who poured the pig's blood on Carrie, woke the living dead in 'Salem's Lot, and gave a bad name to precognition in The Shining. The present collection rounds up his magazine pieces, mainly from Cavalier, and also offers nine stories not previously published. He is as effective in the horror vignette as in the novel. His big opening tale, "Jerusalem's Lot"—about a deserted village—is obviously his first shot at 'Salem's Lot and, in its dependence on a gigantic worm out of Poe and Lovecraft, it misses the novel's gorged frenzy of Vampireville. But most of the other tales go straight through you like rats' fangs. "Graveyard Shift" is about cleaning out a long unused factory basement that has a subbasement—a hideous colony of fat giant blind legless rats that are mutating into bats. It's a story you may wish you hadn't read. You'll enjoy the laundry mangle that becomes possessed and begins pressing people into bedsheets (don't think about that too much), a flu bug that destroys mankind and leaves only a beach blanket party of teenagers ("Night Surf"), and a beautiful lady vampire and her seven-year-old daughter abroad in a Maine blizzard ("One for the Road"). Bizarre dripperies, straight out of Tales from the Crypt comics. . . a leprous distillation.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1977
ISBN: 0385129912
Page Count: 367
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” to Be Epix Show
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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