Hall's soft-bang climax has a cliched ring, but even readers skeptical of demonology will find themselves beguiled by her...
Gripping, much heralded horror debut novel by top TV scripter Hall.
The five years Hall spent on writing, revision, and deep research reap big rewards for the reader in this very serious (and spiritual) shocker. The story: A dark debt, or curse, hangs over the family of a Georgia ex-Satanist. The Landry family has been working off this debt, unbeknownst to its infected members, with insanity, suicide, robbery, murder, and even mass murder. Cam Landry, a reclusive young Los Angeles crime writer who has just signed a publishing contract for $300,000, suddenly goes berserk, robs a liquor store, kills a clerk, then commits suicide. Cam's ex-lover Randa, a journalist for an alternative newspaper, wonders what could have provoked this senseless deed. Romance blooms when the determined Randa goes to the town of Barton, outside Atlanta, to talk with the last surviving Landry, hermit Jack, who knows that insanity, murder, and perhaps suicide likely await him as well. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, Father Michael Kinney, a sexy young Jesuit who edits a far-out Catholic magazine, falls for Tess, a lapsed-Catholic New Yorker editor, when she has him write a piece about an adolescent who murdered his family after an exorcism Michael helped administer failed. Michael, it turns out, is related to the Landrys and is also being stalked by the family curse. Then, fired from his magazine job and exiled to a Georgia parish, Michael meets Jack Landry. Will Michael save Jack, then give up his Roman collar and marry Tess? Can he survive when the same demon gnawing at Jack also goes after him? And why doesn't God help Michael fight the demon?
Hall's soft-bang climax has a cliched ring, but even readers skeptical of demonology will find themselves beguiled by her stringent arguments and research, all set off by strong characters and witty dialogue. (First printing of 150,000; film rights to Paramount; Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection; author tour)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-45146-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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