The action picks up in the terrifying Dublin Woods on Halloween Night in 1892. Mick Patrican is badly wounded, and the woods...
Lukegord (The Haunted Trail, 2013) tosses every horror trope imaginable into this sequel.
The action picks up in the terrifying Dublin Woods on Halloween Night in 1892. Mick Patrican is badly wounded, and the woods are crawling with lunatics intent on murder. He knows he must find a safe place to hide, but he’s also charged with locating two magical four-leaf clovers, one of which is ensconced in a mummy’s evil heart. The clovers are the key to defeating the mummy, ending its curse and saving all of Ireland. Luckily for Mick, the ghosts of his dead brothers have stuck around to help him out. However, Lukegord quickly abandons Mick’s quest, turning instead to a series of brutal murders. Police officers are dispatched into Dublin Woods to search for their missing colleagues and sort through the mayhem, and the various teams are swiftly picked off in multiple violent episodes. The officers spend much of the novel stumbling over dead bodies, themselves, and the evil mummy’s resting place. Soon, even more police are dispatched, in what seems to be a narrative excuse to provide new bodies to annihilate. Mick’s quest is finally revisited near the end, when he defeats the mummy and rescues the four-leaf clover, which also contains healing powers. The author finishes with a chapter that focuses on the fates of various underdeveloped characters. Lukegord has an admirable imagination, and he offers a terrifying, intriguing premise. Indeed, a story of haunted woods on Halloween night, filled with lunatics and murderers, feels like something one might see on the big screen. However, readers unfamiliar with Lukegord’s previous novel may have a hard time playing catch-up, although the actual plot here is thin. The narrative jumps from murder to murder, failing to build any suspense. It may be difficult for readers to become invested in characters that make only brief appearances before meeting gruesome deaths. The unfocused narrative also includes too many classic horror-story elements for such a short novel. Interested in a mummy’s curse that started 2,000 years ago “when [the mummy] was mummified in Egypt and possessed by an alien”? That’s only the beginning. Throw in ghosts, cannibals, wolves and leprechauns, and you’ve got yourself a mess.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499369250
Page Count: 90
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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