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The Ropewalk

Name: The Ropewalk
Author: John Knauf
ISBN: 978-1-4620-5273-8

by John Knauf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 2011

A skillful and very promising debut novel in the Peter Straub/Stephen King mode.

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A debut paranormal thriller set in the 1970s, about a strange presence in an apartment building in an isolated New England coastal town.

Egan Drummond, one of the main characters in Knauf’s atmospheric fiction, has recently taken a job at a boarding school in the distant, coastal town of Bowford, Maine. He lives in a long, rambling apartment building in a renovated 18th-century ropewalk, where he hopes to use his spare time to work on a long, demanding book that’s been preoccupying him for years. His efforts to sink into solitary isolation are complicated, however, by the building’s only other tenants: his fellow teacher, Margaret Gillespie; and her young daughter, Sonya. But Margaret tells Egan that there’s another tenant in the building—someone who mysteriously walks the halls at night. In very little time, he joins Margaret’s informal quest to unravel the riddle of the unknown person—or thing—stalking the ropewalk. Knauf takes these simple plot ingredients, mixes them with ample amounts of Northeastern Native American lore from Egan’s germinating book, and crafts a story that’s very often tense and involving. His characters are largely believable, although Egan’s first-person perspective frequently leans toward the type of purple prose of Gothic fiction: “Perhaps on some level I sensed it would be a reassurance, or even a sort of passive boast, that I had so far escaped the yawning death in whose gullet the thundering echo of the water was louder than ever.” Knauf renders the steadily developing relationship between Egan and Margaret much more subtly and energetically than he does the Dean Koontz-style quasi-supernatural elements. As a result, readers may find themselves wishing that this were a more straightforward relationship novel, although the paranormal aspects gain in strength and eloquence as the novel progresses. The author also delivers necessary exposition regarding Native American mythology and history so smoothly that readers that may not even realize how much they’re learning along the way.

A skillful and very promising debut novel in the Peter Straub/Stephen King mode.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-4620-5273-8

Page Count: 500

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

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An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE BLUE KITE
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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HONEYSUCKLE & PAIN
by Mark Z. Danielewski

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.