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LORD OF THE VAMPIRES

THE DIARIES OF THE FAMILY DRACUL

Last of the Dracula trilogy begun with 1994's Covenant with the Vampire (not reviewed) and Children of the Vampire (1995), and a tasty feast it is. Volumes one and two were prequels to Bram Stoker's Dracula, while the new work carries the action straight into Stoker with an overlapping plotline that cleaves closely to the famous original— and to Francis Ford Coppola's superb film Bram Stoker's Dracula. In the film, Anthony Hopkins played with huge relish the glorious vampire-killer, Dr. Abraham (Bram) Van Helsing, and since Van Helsing is the main character here, the reader finds it hard to divorce grandstanding Hopkins from the author's Van Helsing, especially when Van Helsing's lines richly echo Hopkins's, as when he describes the only way to save Lucy Westenra from rising from the dead: ``We must cut off her head, put a stake through her heart, and fill her mouth with garlic.'' The Lord of the Vampires is an intensely dark figure who first gave Vlad (Dracula) immortality on the condition that he kill the first-born son of each generation of his family. Kalogridis keeps her genealogical spaghetti-tangle fairly clear. Van Helsing, the mortal son of Arkady, a vampire whom Van Helsing killed but failed to behead, must save his own son, wealthy Dr. John Seward, who owns and manages the famous madhouse where insect-eating Renfield is kept behind bars. Vlad must kill Seward. Kalogridis's story quickly dissolves into Stoker's, and familiar scenes pass by, viewed from a fresh angle. The new storyline involves the radiantly beautiful Elisabeth Bathory, who has thrived for many centuries by murdering virgins (600 and counting) and bathing in their blood. She is in search of a magic parchment that will help her kill the hopelessly medieval Vlad himself and bring vampirism up to speed in the 19th century. Kinky sex, a sly, literate narrative and liplicking action, even if largely reheated. Fun.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-31414-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996

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THE ALCHEMIST

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind. 

 The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility. 

 Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

Pub Date: July 1, 1993

ISBN: 0-06-250217-4

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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