First-time novelist Baker makes it to the playoffs with this neo-mythic entry in a baseball subgenre pioneered by Bernard Malamud (The Natural) and advanced by George Plimpton (The Curious Case of Sidd Finch): the story of the rookie from nowhere who blossoms into the greatest player in the history of the game. This time out, the Ruthian giant is one John Barr, a tall, taciturn stranger with ``drowned man's eyes'' who hitchhikes to Hell's Gate, Virginia—home of a New York Mets minor-league franchise—muttering only that ``I came to play.'' So he does, like a dervish in spikes, and takes the sport by storm. Baker unfolds Barr's story through a patchwork of first-person voices, most of them just this side of the nuthouse. There's Rapid Rickey Falls, (``The Old Swizzlehead''), a philandering black slugger who becomes Barr's main ally; Ellsworth Pippin, the patronizing, parsimonious owner of the Mets; Ol' Cal Rigby, a Casey Stengelish manager who carries his false eyes in a box; Stillwater Norman, the dumbest man alive, who dies from choking on a clam; and their peers, the team-as-human-zoo, flashing spikes and bedding groupies with adolescent glee. Sparked by Barr, the crew wins seven pennants and five World Series, the key games recounted by Old Swizzlehead and other voices with high-five thrills. None of these victories, however, teases so much as a smile from the stolid, enigmatic Barr. Herein lies a mystery: What engine drives this strange superstar who avoids girls, disdains money, stays locked within himself? Miniskirted Ellie Jay, ``The Queen of Sportswriters,'' probes without avail. The reader learns the secret, however, in the book's only gaffe—a series of somber, overripe Freudian flashbacks that situate Barr's icy talent in his violence-strewn childhood. Barring the Freudian glop, baseball as it's meant to be.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59088-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic "The Monkey's Paw"—a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here—as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the "Pet Sematary": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death—especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's "annex"—an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex—resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt—when dead Timmy Baterman was "transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?" Will Gage return to the living—but as "a thing of evil?" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise—and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0743412281
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK TO SCREEN
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