``Dark Crime. Dark suspense. Stories of that nature will be for the nineties what horror was for the eighties.'' Let's hope not, actually, if this introductory prediction by the editors pans out into the kind of flat, monotonic tales predominately on display here. The trouble surfaces in Joe R. Lansdale's leadoff story, whose tantalizing title, ``The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance,'' gives way to a brisk but standard yarn in which a clerk battles a maniac—a dullish outing for an author whose splatterpunk work has raged with moral fire. F. Paul Wilson is up next, with ``The Long Way Home,'' again a well-crafted tale, this one about a legendary vigilante, but again one with no real idea behind it. And so it goes with stories by Neal Barrett, Jr. (a hit man), Steven Rasnic Tem (home-invasion terror), Lewis Shiner (a patsy's vengeance), Chet Williamson (subway mayhem), William F. Nolan (a serial killer), and David Morrell, whose concluding novella, ``The Shrine,'' strikes an oddly maudlin note in its depiction of a sheriff mourning his dead family. A few tales do prick—Andrew Vachss's ``Treatment,'' reiterating his perpetual vengeance-against-abusers theme with fine irony; Bill Crider's ``An Evening Out with Carl,'' which plays a dirty trick on a rapist; and Thomas Sullivan's spookily moving ``Deep Down Under,'' about a little girl caught in a plane crash. And there is Ed Gorman's exceptionally haunting ``The Long Silence After,'' in which an AIDS victim stalks his infector. But why, of these 20 original stories, do so few resonate beneath their tempered macho glaze? Surely in part because only one woman writer appears here: Ardath Mayhar, whose ``fiction,'' the editors assure us, ``is often quite unladylike''—presumably as in her cleverly nasty but slight entry, ``Aunt Dolly.'' What might have been a groundbreaking anthology, a Dark Forces of crime fiction, proves nothing more than a competent but uninspired anthology with no cutting edge.
Pub Date: April 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-913165-64-6
Page Count: 350
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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