A fun read for PI aficionados and kitschy horror fans alike.
A jaded private detective in a monster-stricken city gets more than he bargained for when his client dies under suspicious circumstances.
From vampires to poltergeists to voodoo priests and zombies, the residents of San Monstruo—“THE CITY OF MONSTERS AND NIGHTMARES,” a highway sign reads—are anything but regular, and the regular people, or “regulars,” who live there are a strange bunch, too. Seemingly everyone is chased by their own versions of something worse than monsters and nightmares. Most of the monsters, however, are—despite their monstrous appearances, unconventional lifestyles and unsavory dietary preferences—actually not so scary; they’re just trying to make a living and even be upstanding citizens like anyone else. The city even puts the zombies (protective mouth guards securely fastened) to work as street sweepers. Like any city, San Monstruo has its share of criminals and lowlifes, though the underbelly feels a bit more threatening than most, thanks to the fangs, claws and all sorts of magic. As a former police detective, Vic Brahm used to make it his business to protect the city from an unusually grotesque brand of criminals, but after leaving the force, his only business now is with anyone willing to pay him for his PI work. When Mr. Chatha, a 4,000-year-old Egyptian, contracts Vic to investigate his wife Diane’s suspected infidelity, it seems like a pretty open-and-shut case—until Diane, after finding Vic’s card in Mr. Chatha’s desk, shows up at Vic’s office asking for his help investigating her husband’s alleged suicide. Meanwhile, Vic’s old partner from the force, a sasquatch named Jerry, is stuck trying to find the Riding Hood killer; he’d sure like Vic to help him out. In spite of being a fairly standard, sometimes-predictable detective novel in its character types and storylines, Cowlin’s debut still stands out as a worthwhile read. The well-built, horror-inspired world of San Monstruo offers just the right balance of humor and creepiness to keep readers on the edges of their seats without being quite terrified. The novel shines the most brightly, however, as the author explores what it means to be a monster. There’s one in everyone.
A fun read for PI aficionados and kitschy horror fans alike.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-937484-18-7
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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