It’s not subtle, but it works. Whenever Oates (Middle Age, p. 970, etc.) composes at this length, she doesn’t pad or...
Oates’s newest novella is a tale of academe similar to (though darker than) such earlier books as The Hungry Ghosts (1974) and American Appetites (1989).
The story begins and ends in Paris, in the Louvre, where protagonist Gillian Brauer observes a garishly expressionistic “totem” that triggers buried memories of her college years. Oates thereafter moves backward and forward in time and among a catastrophic 1975 house fire in a college community in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Mountains, the events leading up to it, and Gillian’s conflicted feelings about the couple who “adopted” her, and her own inchoate sensibility and sexuality. At Catamount College for Women, in the wake of the permissive, volatile late 1960s, Gillian falls under the spell of her literature professor Andre Harrow, a charismatic (if vaguely goatish) mentor who chants D.H. Lawrence’s “voluptuous” verses to his poetry-writing seminar students, and teasingly addresses withdrawn Gillian as “Philomela” (a telling allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Meanwhile, a series of small fires set by an uncaught arsonist terrifies Catamount’s students (two of whom happen to be named Sibyl and Cassandra)—as Gillian finds herself attracted as well to Harrow’s sultry French wife Dorcas, a sculptress whose powerfully animistic, “primitive and dramatic” half-human figures hewed out of wood hint at elemental experiences Gillian is only beginning to imagine. Their correlative is Andre’s classroom mantra “Go deeper. Go for the jugular.” As Gillian becomes the latest of a number of students made the Harrows’ sexual and domestic slaves, Andre’s imperative that artists must acknowledge their pagan, animal natures and act accordingly is ironically fulfilled as is the motto engraved on Dorcas’s creations: “WE ARE BEASTS AND THIS IS OUR CONSOLATION.”
It’s not subtle, but it works. Whenever Oates (Middle Age, p. 970, etc.) composes at this length, she doesn’t pad or overwrite. The result is a cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0896-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally...
After a hit-and-run kills a high school student, the court of public opinion convicts a lonely outcast.
When Jackie Reed hears her 17-year-old son, Wade, sneaking out the night before the SATs, she knows she should stop him; instead, she pops a Xanax and returns to bed. At 4 a.m., Jackie’s 13-year-old, Connor, wakes to find a rain-soaked Wade hiding something in his closet; he considers tattling but promises to keep quiet. These seemingly innocuous decisions come back to haunt Jackie and Connor the next morning. While Officer Pearl Maze was working the graveyard shift at the Havenkill, New York, police department, Amy Nathanson burst through the door claiming to have been carjacked. According to Amy, her screams summoned 17-year-old Liam Miller, whom the thief ran over during his escape. The cops canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, and the Reeds are stunned to realize that Wade matches the suspect’s description. Evidence mounts against him, and the community ostracizes his family, but still Wade refuses to divulge his whereabouts at the time of the accident. The book opens with Wade’s suicide note, then flashes back five days and unfolds from the perspectives of Jackie, Connor, Pearl, and Amy. This narrative shift maximizes suspense by forcing readers to guess at Wade’s thoughts and actions, allowing Gaylin to insightfully explore the crime’s ripple effects.
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally develops between teenagers and their families and stocks it with sharks.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-264111-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A chilling story set under a blistering sun, this fine debut will keep readers on edge and awake long past bedtime.
A mystery that starts with a sad homecoming quickly turns into a nail-biting thriller about family, friends, and forensic accounting.
Federal agent Aaron Falk is called back to his rural Australian hometown for the funeral of his best friend, Luke, who apparently committed suicide after killing his wife and 6-year-old son; he’s also called to reckon with his own past. Falk and his father were run out of town when he was accused of killing his girlfriend. Luke gave him an alibi, but more than one person in town knows he was lying. When Luke’s parents ask Falk to find the truth, long-buried secrets begin to surface. Debut author Harper plots this novel with laser precision, keeping suspects in play while dropping in flashbacks that offer readers a full understanding of what really happened. The setting adds layers of meaning. Kiewarra is suffering an epic drought, and Luke’s suicide could easily be explained by the failure of his farm. The risk of wildfire, especially in a broken community rife with poverty and alcoholism, keeps nerves strung taut. Falk's focus as an investigator is on following the money; nobody in town really understands his job, but his phone number turns up on a scrap of paper belonging to Luke’s late wife, a woman he’d never met. The question throughout is whether Luke’s death is something a CSI of spreadsheets can unravel or if it’s a matter of bad blood from times past finally having reached the boiling point. Falk struggles to separate the two and let his own old grudges go. A fellow investigator chastises him: “You’re staring so hard at the past that it’s blinding you.”
A chilling story set under a blistering sun, this fine debut will keep readers on edge and awake long past bedtime.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10560-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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