An unfocused horror tale that never quite moves beyond being merely a collection of gory scenes.
A brief debut tale of murders in a Dublin forest.
This novel’s setting is truly creepy: a forest full of “the mentally ill,” in Dublin on Halloween in 1892. Although the danger of the forest is apparently legendary, people keep wandering in, only to be brutally murdered. The story has a slasher-movie feel, as very little connects the different murders; instead, each are like set pieces at a haunted hayride—drive past, and then they’re gone. It starts with the story of a young boy who messes with a killer’s scarecrow and ends with the story of another character who finally manages to fight back. However, the novel makes little effort to set scenes or build dramatic momentum. Scenes frequently go by without any dialogue, and it may be hard for readers to tell where characters are in the physical landscape. The action also often pauses at the start of many sections to accommodate a flashback and relate a character’s backstory. One character, Scott McArthur, is described as having “violent tendencies toward his family,” but readers aren’t shown that through McArthur’s treatment of his son. McArthur’s mental instability was caused by stepping on a mummy’s grave, which is described plainly, twice: “it rose from beyond its grave and attacked him” and then, a few sentences later, “a mummy suddenly arose from beyond the dead and attacked him.” However, readers aren’t told why he was there, who he was with, or how he ended up in that particular graveyard. Indeed, many characters are killed off within a few pages of their introduction, before readers could possibly become attached to them at all. Overall, this story has a promisingly frightening setup, but it doesn’t coalesce into a memorable story.
An unfocused horror tale that never quite moves beyond being merely a collection of gory scenes.Pub Date: May 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489543219
Page Count: 72
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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