In his contrived but fast-paced thriller, bestselling novelist Saul (Guardian, 1993) does for insects what Hitchcock's The Birds did for our feathered friends. The action takes place in central California, where a teenage girl running away from home to escape her mother's lecherous boyfriend reinvents herself as Dawn Morningstar en route to Hollywood. She unwisely accepts a ride from a stranger who turns out to be entomologist Carl Henderson, an evil genius who, before Dawn's dreadful death, holds her hostage in the dank basement of his Pleasant Valley home, making her the object of monstrous experiments with bees, scorpions, ants, etc. At around the same time, widow Karen Spellman travels to Pleasant Valley from Los Angeles with her two daughters, nine-year-old Molly and sullen teenager Julie. Karen is getting hitched to her high school sweetheart, Russell Owen, who owns a farm, some horses, and a barn full of beehives with which Carl has been fooling around on the sly. After Molly nearly dies from a strangely virulent bee sting, Julie investigates, gets assaulted by Carl, and is stung herself while trying to flee. Russell's cranky father, Otto, saves her, but Carl tampers with the experimental antivenin the local clinic gives Julie, hoping it will be lethal. Instead, the chemical compound turns her into a ravenous queen bee host who seduces boys by the bizarre technique of spewing forth a swarm of the buzzing, biting creatures. ``And from Julie's mouth emerged a swirling black cloud, a dark and writhing mist that split instantly into dozens of serpentine tongues...and curled around Jeff Larkin's head like tentacles,'' writes Saul with characteristic hyperbole. His excessive style will never win him any literary prizes, but it's creepily compelling. A skillful manipulation of primal fears about the natural world and the corruption of innocence.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-449-90863-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
But, still, this is an interesting debut, with some beautifully lyrical evocations of place and emotion.
A first novel of Brontëan intensity and Gothic nastiness from British writer Barker, who, in telling the story of an irrevocably doomed young woman, indicts Scottish life as well.
Janet, the eldest of five—born in her grandparents' comfortable manse near Edinburgh while father Hector is away at war—soon begins the cycle of hurts that will culminate in her murder at 16. After her beloved grandmother dies, Janet is soon and permanently supplanted in her mother's affections by a quick succession of more babies. Vera, the mother, "only really liked babies and found children annoying. In fact, she said it was possible for a mother to dislike her own child"—a fact that doesn't cheer Janet but does reconcile her somewhat to her mother's coldness. But a move to a remote ancestral castle, an austerely beautiful place where winter is five months long, merely isolates Janet further. Her only consolations are reading, learning Latin and Greek, nature, and the friendship of an aging and alcoholic cousin whom her mother detests and soon sends away. Residing in Caledonia, whose Calvinist nature is "pitiless," Janet, exquisitely sensitive to pain and suffering, is predestined to be unhappy. At home, she is ignored by her family; away at boarding school, a bleak and relentlessly anti-intellectual place, she survives by helping with homework and telling stories against herself; and a venture into local society is a disaster. School over, Janet returns home, where her family and their servants treat her with even greater insensitivity. Someone like poor Janet- -isolated, her only companion a bird she's rescued, and increasingly emotionally distraught—can have no happy ending: her rather abrupt murder is a welcome end to a life of unmitigated misery. The unceasing victimization of Janet can seem just too much, as the point is soon taken about narrow and pitiless Caledonia.
But, still, this is an interesting debut, with some beautifully lyrical evocations of place and emotion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-167774-3
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
A great cure for the blues, especially for anyone who might feel bad about growing older.
A Swedish debut novel that will keep readers chuckling.
Allan Karlsson has just turned 100, and the Old Folks’ Home is about to give him a birthday party that he absolutely doesn’t want. So he leaves out his window and high-tails it to a bus station, with no particular destination in mind. On a whim, he steals a suitcase and boards a bus. The suitcase’s owner, a criminal, will do anything to get it back. This is the basis for a story that is loaded with absurdities from beginning to end—the old coot has plenty of energy for his age and an abiding love of vodka. The story goes back and forth between the current chase and his long, storied life. From childhood, he has shown talent with explosives. This knack catches the attention of many world leaders of the 20th century: Franco, Truman, Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, to name a few of the people he meets. Want to blow up bridges? Allan’s your man. Want much bigger explosions? Just pour him a drink. He’s neither immoral nor amoral, but he is certainly detached, and he is absolutely apolitical. In the past, he insults Stalin (luckily, the translator faints), learns Russian in a gulag and walks back to Sweden from China, barely surviving execution in Iran along the way. In the present, he meets a strange and delightful collection of friends and enemies. Coincidence and absurdity are at the core of this silly and wonderful novel. Looking back, it seems there are no hilarious, roll-on-the-floor-laughing scenes. They will just keep readers amused almost nonstop, and that’s a feat few writers achieve.
A great cure for the blues, especially for anyone who might feel bad about growing older.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2464-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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