While the Gothicism works well, at times Harwood’s convolutions become as mystifying to the reader as to the characters he...
Creepy doings—certificates of insanity, switched identities, morbid personalities—in and around an asylum in 19th-century England.
While it’s not exactly clear why the Victorian period is so amenable to such sinister and disturbing phenomena, Harwood certainly makes the atmosphere work here. In 1882, a young woman wakes up at Tregannon House, a former mansion in Cornwall, now turned into an insane asylum run by Dr. Straker and his gruesomely unwholesome assistant, Frederic Mordaunt. Although the day before she had introduced herself as Lucy Ashton, later that night she is found unconscious, and when she emerges from a nightmare the following morning, she’s convinced her name is Georgina Ferrars and that she lives with her uncle in London. When Dr. Straker goes to London to sort out the confusion with Ferrars’ (or is it Ashton's?) identity, he comes back to Tregannon House with the disturbing report that she must be an imposter, for he met the “real” Georgina Ferrars at her uncle’s. Disturbingly, the more the Georgina in the asylum tries to assert her identity, the more the authority figures are persuaded she’s delusional, so she’s committed to the involuntary wing of the asylum, where she’s convinced the only way for her to reclaim her identity is to escape. Also upsetting is that she begins to have flashbacks to childhood memories in which she had an imaginary friend/alter ego named Rosina. We’re then taken back to a series of letters from Rosina Wentworth to Emily Ferrars about 20 years previously—and eventually to a journal written by Georgina Ferrars. Rosina breathlessly reports to her cousin all the latest gossip, dwelling especially on her own romantic entanglements with Felix Mordaunt, owner of a mansion in Cornwall. Once again, identities shift.
While the Gothicism works well, at times Harwood’s convolutions become as mystifying to the reader as to the characters he depicts.Pub Date: May 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-00347-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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