A tale compromised by bizarre plot turns and an unsatisfying ending.
A debut novel by memoirist Kilmer-Purcell (I Am Not Myself These Days, 2006) that follows the adventures of a gay Midwestern, TV-obsessed teenager.
Jayson Blocher has always dreamed of escaping his tiny town of Oconomowoc, Wis., to make it big as a celebrity. But for a time it looks like his story’s climax is going to be tricking his neighbor Trey into kissing him. That is until Jayson’s erratic mother Toni gets stuck in a long-brewing financial and parenting crisis. Toni ships her son off in the middle of the night on a plane to New York to meet the aging movie star Oscard Harlande (Harley), whom she reveals, on the way to the airport, is Jayson’s father. Within the space of a few chapters, Jayson moves into the house from which his father is running a male prostitution ring, falls in love with his childhood TV crush, Devlin Williamson, and becomes a small-time celebrity after cruising into the starring role in a commercial for after-dinner mints. But there’s more. Jayson and Devlin become homeless when the prostitution ring is busted and Harley disappears with Jayson’s money, and the two move into the abandoned building in SoHo that Toni’s new lesbian lover’s drug addict brother calls home. By the time the whole Oconomowoc crew shows up in SoHo, with Jayson’s pregnant friend Tara and his special-needs brother Willie in tow, the novel starts moving into the Spectrum of the Ridiculous. But before this story can end, Jayson has to rush (or, at this point, stagger) back to Oconomowoc to rescue Trey from the perverse social-services cop who has locked him in his basement.
A tale compromised by bizarre plot turns and an unsatisfying ending.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-133696-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.
A forsaken family bound by grief still struggles to pick up the pieces 12 years after their mother’s death.
When famous author Gil Coleman sees “his dead wife standing on the pavement below” from a bookshop window in a small town on the southern coast of England, he follows her, but to no avail, and takes a near-fatal fall off a walkway on the beach. As soon as they hear word of his accident, Gil’s grown daughters, Nan and Flora, drop everything and return to their seaside family home in Spanish Green. Though her father’s health is dire, Flora, Gil’s youngest, can’t help but be consumed by the thought that her mother, Ingrid—who went missing and presumably drowned (though the body was never found) off the coast more than a decade ago—could be alive, wandering the streets of their town. British author Fuller’s second novel (Our Endless Numbered Days, 2015) is nimbly told from two alternating perspectives: Flora’s, as she re-evaluates the loose ends of her mother’s ambiguous disappearance; and Ingrid’s, through a series of candid letters she writes, but never delivers, to Gil in the month leading up to the day she vanishes. The most compelling parts of this novel unfold in Ingrid’s letters, in which she chronicles the dissolution of her 16-year marriage to Gil, beginning when they first meet in 1976: Gil is her alluring professor, they engage in a furtive love affair, and fall into a hasty union precipitated by an unexpected pregnancy; Gil gains literary fame, and Ingrid is left to tackle motherhood alone (including two miscarriages); and it all bitterly culminates in the discovery of an irrevocable betrayal. Unbeknownst to Gil and his daughters, these letters remain hidden, neglected, in troves of books throughout the house, and the truth lies seductively within reach. Fuller’s tale is eloquent, harrowing, and raw, but it’s often muddled by tired, cloying dialogue. And whereas Ingrid shines as a protagonist at large, the supporting characters are lacking in depth.
Simmering with tension, this tragic, albeit imperfect, mystery is sure to keep readers inching off their seats.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-941040-51-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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