In an amateurish first novel about a pair of amateur detectives, the Acting President of the US plays the latest in high-tech, dirty campaign tricks on his high-minded electoral opponent, whose aide has to clean up the mess in the few days left before the election. The smear job pulled on the ambitious but upright Senator Gillian makes Watergate look like cherry bombs in the toilet. Making their approach through New York Times reporter Mitch Rydell, shadowy neo-Nazis claim to have proof of ties between their group and the liberal senator. Rydell will buy the story if the old friend who brought the news to him comes through with journalistically sound documentation of the charge. The proof never arrives, the friend mysteriously dies, Rydell backs off, and it is up to a malicious TV reporter to make the charge of crypto-fascism in the middle of the first nationally televised debate between Gillian and Acting President Erhardt, the zillionaire former electronics mogul who ascended to the throne when the President went into a coma. Gillian's campaign aide Laura Madison, who hopes to be presidential press secretary, gets the order to drop everything and trace the dirty tricks to their source—a messy job that gets messier when Laura and Mitch sit up to watch the news on cable and then see a fake photo of Gillian with his arm around a supposedly dead Nazi on an ethnic, evangelical cable channel. The undead Nazi quickly pops up to say it's all nonsense before he too dies a mysterious and final death. The deeper the frightened journalism majors dig, the worse everything looks.... Nancy Drew and The Case of the Mysterious Character Assassination.
Pub Date: June 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-8027-1146-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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