A 5,000-year-old Irish demoness is released from her burial mound in the countryside around seaside Kilgallan—and swims like spirochetes into the reader's brain. Scottish author Donnelly (in his first US publication) dumps out the worst he can dream up and—with his many graphically messy and pulpy deaths—brings a new grisliness to the horror novel. This is no book for kids under 30. The story: some archaeologists uncover a mysterious tomb in the Kilgallan hillside and in doing so unlock the prison of a shapeless black demoness, the Shee, who was imprisoned there millennia ago by the hero Cuchullain. Now Kilgallan is swept by monstrous murders. People (the luckier ones) get their heads eaten or sucked off—and so that there will be plenty of reader-identifiable folks to do away with later, a bevy of villagers, scientists, and reporters is fed into the tale early on. A mother suckling her newborn slowly smothers the child between her breasts. Another suckling mother suddenly can't pull her baby from her breast as the baby grows teeth, sucks out, bites off and gobbles down the whole inside of her breast—before really satisfying its hunger. A young woman teaching her nephew to swim in a stream strips naked and trapping the boy between her breasts drowns him amid orgasms. These incidents might be retold in a family newspaper. But Donnelly soon slips into a rotting and drippingly pustuled ghoulishness, a picnic of diseased, grabbing, pullulating vulvas. Traveling reporter Liz Cannon has photog Sean McCullain with her to eke out some feature stories in mild Kilgallan. But Sean has bad dreams, sees himself as Cuchullain. Then Shee starts snacking unstoppably and brings in waves of creepy-crawlies, spiders, giant man-eating eels, and a tsunami, before Sean finds himself armed against her with the sword of the Lord of Light. Well written, yes—if you like lapping up pus and maggots for fun.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-7126-5022-9
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Century/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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