by John Shirley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2001
Without question the worst book of the year, a place it will hold throughout all 2001—unless Shirley’s next swim through...
Laughably overpriced wacko novel that is the Plan Nine from Outer Space of horror titles and deserves burial under a mound of manure. Looking to top his dubious distinction in publishing the grisliest vampire tale of 1992 (Wetbones), he devotes his latest fiction to a loving catalogue of hell’s endless horrors: impalements, throat slashings, AIDS carcinomas and bedsores, people who die again and again, having themselves drowned for the joy of it and for the wonderful period of relief while dead before reanimation for another a horrible death. Hell, you see, inflicts death upon death on the same sufferer, over and over and over, in endless hideous variations. Shirley has the same right to chronicle such atrocities as the Marquis de Sade or Hieronymous Bosch, but his lurid depictions lack any of their art. In this hellscape of unrelieved emotional and physical carnage, nine-year-olds are repeatedly raped, burned with cigarettes, and sent out to beg, however fruitless their begging. The plot? Very vague, with two alien intelligences overlooking these horrors and one of them enjoying them so much that he’s made to stay here and serve the Master.
Without question the worst book of the year, a place it will hold throughout all 2001—unless Shirley’s next swim through feces challenges it. There’s some audience that sucks on his lollipops of pain?Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-931081-09-3
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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