The Sixth Sense meets Thelma and Louise.
A brief but slow-reading third outing by Hepinstall (The Absence of Nectar 2001, etc.) pits maternal love against rational thought. Mom wins.
In Ohio, a distraught man named David hires a private detective to find his missing wife Martha, traumatized since a bomb went off—killing some—at their six-year-old son Duncan’s elementary school. Unbeknownst to David, Martha has arrived at an isolated desert cave in Texas where she hopes to protect Duncan from the dangers of the world. A florist, she learned about the sanctuary from one of her clients, an old man who taught her that “loved ones don’t die on their own; we let them die. We violate some rule.” Although she loves David, Martha has left him behind because he refused to accept her increased protectiveness toward Duncan and forced her to visit a psychiatrist, who sides with him. She arrives at the cave with two months’ worth of food (an unbelievable feat in itself), plenty of candles, and a John Denver CD. With incredible ease, she settles into the primitive life, spending her days fishing, teaching Duncan to read, and swimming in a lake full of blind fish. Then a handsome stranger—the detective—shows up, bearing the chocolate bars Duncan loves. He has also assumed the first name of Martha’s father, whose death in a hit-and-run accident she feels she caused by not psychically protecting him. The detective, haunted by his own dark past, gradually wins Martha’s trust but is equally seduced by the passionate sureness of her life. By now, most readers will have realized that Duncan died in the bombing and Martha has come to the desert because there no one can stop her from believing he’s still alive. When David shows up—or does he?—things get even murkier, for Martha must choose which reality—or unreality—she wants more.
The Sixth Sense meets Thelma and Louise.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-14936-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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