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DARK AT HEART

Name: DARK AT HEART
Author: Karen Lansdale
ISBN: 0-913165-64-6

edited by Karen Lansdale & Joe R. Lansdale ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1992

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``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

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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BETWEEN SISTERS

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...

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Sisters in and out of love.

Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?

Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-345-45073-6

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WOMEN
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE FOUR WINDS
by Kristin Hannah

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GREAT ALONE
by Kristin Hannah

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THE ALCHEMIST

by Paulo Coelho & translated by Margaret Jull Costa ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1993

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.

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Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.

The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.

Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.