Eighteen fantastic stories, including parodies, inspired by horrormeister H.P. Lovecraft (18901937). Some are reprints from earlier Lovecraftian anthologies, but most come from original magazines, rare limited-edition chapbooks, and one from an ephemeral convention program guide. Editor Turner describes the Providence recluse, whose fame arose decades after his death, as a fantasist of cosmic wonder, a scientific materialist indifferent to the cosmos-at-large, and an atheist who nonetheless expressed fervent feelings of ``mystic adventurous expectancy.'' Turner has the great good wisdom to kick off his collection with F. Paul Wilson's wonderfully mellow ``The Barrens,'' about the Piney Lights and the Jersey Devil that haunt the huge New Jersey pine barrens and grant the reader a creepy backwoods entry beyond the veil. In Lawrence Watt-Evans's ``Pickman's Modem,'' an astral modem rewrites a bad speller's prose, goes off into tirades ``of stupendous fury and venom,'' and may well have fed Pickmanthe bad speller himselflive to the Internet. Kim Newman's ``The Big Fish'' mixes Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep with Lovecraftian slime, a vicious mermaid, and the Deep Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos. In her inspired hallucinatory Early Neon style, Poppy Z. Brite's ``His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood'' tells of two New Orleans decadents who've come into 50 outlawed bottles of absinthe and are at wits' end for some new perversion: They open their own personal museum or charnel house for holding the severed head of one of their mothers, stolen eyeballs, withered hands and heads, and a voodoo fetish that just happens to be a pettish vampire's lost canine tooth . . . which he wants back. Also outstanding: T.E.D. Klein's velvet ``Black Man with a Horn'' and Roger Zelazny's delicate ``24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.'' Not a dead page in this sinless sheaf. Does Arkham and Lovecraft proud—and may Arkham someday reprint its first book ever, Lovecraft's omnibus The Outsider.
Pub Date: Dec. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-87054-169-2
Page Count: 429
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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