A mysterious and unsettling debut touching on grief, mourning, environmental calamity, and the healing potential of...
More than 25 years after serving in the Gulf War, Marty Bird still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
In fact, neighbors recently phoned Marty’s daughter, Julie, in Vancouver to report that Marty seems to be getting worse, bellowing in the middle of the night and disturbing people’s sleep. Julie is perplexed, scared, and upends her life to return to Port Braid, a coastal town in British Columbia, to assist her ailing dad. After all, her mom is dead, and there are few friends able or willing to care for the elder Bird. Once home, however, Julie discovers that Marty’s decline is just one of a slew of issues tormenting local residents. Shockingly, a whale has washed ashore, and other animals—bats, caribou, deer, eagles, fish, hares, mice, raccoons, skunks—are dying in record numbers, drowning themselves or careening into walls or mountains. On top of this, a stranger has come into Port Braid and is captivating everyone in her orbit. Calling herself Jennie Lee Lewis, or JLL, she is a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator. In short order, JLL has convinced Marty to let her perform in the restaurant he owns and move into the bungalow he’s lived in for decades even though Julie is still staying there, too. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that JLL and Marty have a shared history, but it is never clear why she tracked Marty down at this particular time or what she is hoping to achieve from the reunion. And these are not the only befuddlements. The story also suggests that wide-scale death is a necessary component of Earth’s rebirth, a curious concept for characters without overt religious convictions or a clearly articulated interest in spiritual matters.
A mysterious and unsettling debut touching on grief, mourning, environmental calamity, and the healing potential of friendship.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77041-414-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Steinbeck's peculiarly intense simplicity of technique is admirably displayed in this vignette — a simple, tragic tale of Mexican little people, a story retold by the pearl divers of a fishing hamlet until it has the quality of folk legend. A young couple content with the humble living allowed them by the syndicate which controls the sale of the mediocre pearls ordinarily found, find their happiness shattered when their baby boy is stung by a scorpion. They dare brave the terrors of a foreign doctor, only to be turned away when all they can offer in payment is spurned. Then comes the miracle. Kino find a great pearl. The future looks bright again. The baby is responding to the treatment his mother had given. But with the pearl, evil enters the hearts of men:- ambition beyond his station emboldens Kino to turn down the price offered by the dealers- he determines to go to the capital for a better market; the doctor, hearing of the pearl, plants the seed of doubt and superstition, endangering the child's life, so that he may get his rake-off; the neighbors and the strangers turn against Kino, burn his hut, ransack his premises, attack him in the dark — and when he kills, in defense, trail him to the mountain hiding place- and kill the child. Then- and then only- does he concede defeat. In sorrow and humility, he returns with his Juana to the ways of his people; the pearl is thrown into the sea.... A parable, this, with no attempt to add to its simple pattern.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1947
ISBN: 0140187383
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1947
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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