bookshelf

THE CHILDREN OF CTHULHU

Name: THE CHILDREN OF CTHULHU
Author: John Pelan
ISBN: 0-345-44926-6

CHILLING NEW TALES INSPIRED BY H.P. LOVECRAFT

edited by John Pelan & Benjamin Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2002

We repeat our earlier prayer to Arkham House, that they reprint the original Outsider and Others (1939), the basic text for...

bookshelf

The spirit of the Rhode Island Master descends upon 23 disciples willing to summon up the squids and squirms of the 20th-century’s weirdest and most influential horror writer. Over 107 other Cthulhu-“inspired” books cling to the eldritch penman from Providence. One tastes less of the coppery tang of blood from Lovecraft’s pen than the ripple of fear when cosmic Yog-Sothoths slip under your skin and race up your back—and you go about switching on lamps and the backyard houselight, checking the garage, weighing the creaks in the attic, and choosing not to go down to the cellar. Standouts here include esteemed stylist Poppy Z. Brite’s “Are You Loathsome Tonight?”—a tale worthy of Elvis’s blue suede shoes that ties up the Tupalo Troubador’s favored peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches fried in butter with Lovecraft’s thoughts about sensation. Brite in no way tries to explain or come to grips with Lovecraft, whose aliens remain unknowable even to him. Just as the unconscious is truly unconscious and not to be plumbed, aliens we might understand would no longer be alien. As Pelan and Adams explain, describing his creations out of space and time, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep are beyond genealogy. In China Miéville’s “Details,” an old woman recluse sees something looking at her from the lines of a brick wall and the leaves of a tree, something that is colonizing her memories and mind. Also here: the late and grisly Richard Laymon, with “The Cabin in the Woods”—about the “horrible thing” that wants to get into his cabin after sunset—and Caitlìn R. Kiernan (the recent Trilobite), who, in “Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea,” brings her glorious prose to bear on the geology of horror.

We repeat our earlier prayer to Arkham House, that they reprint the original Outsider and Others (1939), the basic text for all Lovecraft fans.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-44926-6

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET
edited by Michael Reaves & John Pelan

bookshelf

SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

bookshelf

Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

bookshelf

LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

bookshelf

Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.