Dan (Unnatural Acts, 2012, etc.), who’ll clearly do anything for a laugh, seems to be having the time of his afterlife. The...
A serial scalper threatens to ignite a full-scale war between two bands of werewolves in Dan Chambeaux’s Unnatural Quarter. And there’s much, much more.
Now that Death Warmed Over, the first volume based on his adventures, has been published by the ghostwriter Linda Bullwer, aka Penny Dreadful, Dan ought to be one happy fella, since even posthumous fame is welcome to a zombie detective. But his brow is furrowed—or it would be, if undead brows furrowed—by problems in the Quarter. It’s clear that whoever shaved the pate of Rusty, the werewolf who runs cockatrice fights, has practiced on other werewolves, whether they’re Hairballs like Rusty, who remain always lycanthropes, or the Monthlies they’re feuding with, like troublemakers Scratch and Sniff, who turn wolf only under the full moon. When randy young vampire Ben Willard is murdered and his organs harvested, panic runs through the Quarter. A lesser shamus would forget his commitments to Archibald Victor, who wants Tony Cralo’s Spare Parts Emporium to replace the defective spleen and brain they sold him; to Steve Halsted, Dan’s dirt brother, whose ex-wife Rova, the world’s worst beautician, won’t let him visit his son because he’s a zombie and demands more child support even though he’s undead; and to Esther, the harpy waitress at Ghoul’s Diner who can’t get rid of a bad-luck charm a disgruntled wizard left her as a tip. Not Dan, who not only perseveres with each case, but manages to knit several of them together as neatly as witches Mavis and Alma Wannovich patch Dan’s diverse bullet holes after every round of his investigations.
Dan (Unnatural Acts, 2012, etc.), who’ll clearly do anything for a laugh, seems to be having the time of his afterlife. The result is like an early, funny Woody Allen film with zombies, ghosts, vampires and werewolves.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7582-7738-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
An instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.
Rival magicians square off to display and match their powers in an extravagant historical fantasy being published simultaneously in several countries, to be marketed as Harry Potter for adults.
But English author Clarke’s spectacular debut is something far richer than Potter: an absorbing tale of vaulting ambition and mortal conflict steeped in folklore and legend, enlivened by subtle characterizations and a wittily congenial omniscient authorial presence. The agreeably convoluted plot takes off with a meeting in of “gentleman-magicians” in Yorkshire in 1806, the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The participants’ scholarly interests are encouraged by a prophecy “that one day magic would be restored to England by two magicians” and would subsequently be stimulated by the coming to national prominence of Gilbert Norrell, a fussy pedant inclined to burrow among his countless books of quaint and curious lore, and by dashing, moody Jonathan Strange, successfully employed by Lord Wellington to defeat French forces by magical means. Much happens. A nobleman’s dead wife is revived but languishes in a half-unreal realm called “Lost-hope”—as does Stephen Black, the same nobleman’s black butler, enigmatically assured by a nameless “gentleman with thistle-down hair” that he (Stephen) is a monarch in exile. Clarke sprinkles her radiantly readable text with faux-scholarly (and often hilarious) footnotes while building an elaborate plot that takes Strange through military glory, unsuccessful attempts to cure England’s mad king, travel to Venice and a meeting with Lord Byron, and on a perilous pursuit of the fabled Raven King, former ruler of England, into the world of Faerie, and Hell (“The only magician to defeat Death !”). There’s nothing in Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, or any of their peers that surpasses the power with which Clarke evokes this fabulous figure’s tangled “history.” The climax, in which Strange and Norrell conspire to summon the King, arrives—for all the book’s enormous length—all too soon.
An instant classic, one of the finest fantasies ever written.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-416-7
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Gold ingots, a corpulent white sow, polyandry, incest, miscegenation, a new time-portal and much backstory augment this...
Time-travelers revolutionize colonial America with anachronisms and cliffhangers galore, in Gabaldon’s sixth Outlander epic.
It’s 1773, and we rejoin Jamie Fraser, an exiled Scots laird, and his 20th-century physician wife Claire in the North Carolina colony where they had emigrated in Drums of Autumn (1997). Their mountain compound, Fraser’s Ridge, is shared by daughter Brianna, her husband Roger and, intermittently, by Ian, Jamie’s semi-feral nephew, a former adopted Mohawk. Brianna and Roger, also moderns, had slipped through a time portal in the Highlands. Jamie and Claire, now middle-aged, still have plenty of swash in their buckle. Roger doubts son Jem’s paternity since Brianna was raped by pirate Stephen Bonnet in a previous installment. Jamie, forced to swear fealty to the Crown, inwardly espouses the rebel cause, and not just because his relatives know who wins. Abductions and daring rescues abound. Claire is kidnapped by a band of marauding arsonists. On her return, hot flashes and non-stop medical emergencies demand her attention. Homemade penicillin, quinine and ether help her cure appendicitis, malaria and syphilis. Brianna invents matches, makes paper and almost brings hot running water to the Ridge. When Claire falls ill amid a dysentery epidemic, no one suspects her assistant Malva, abused daughter (actually niece) of Jamie’s comrade Tom Christie. Later, Malva, six months pregnant, implicates Jamie. Claire finds Malva dead, her throat slit, and attempts an emergency Caesarian. Taken prisoner, Claire becomes the colonial governor’s unpaid scribe. While Roger, called to the ministry, is away seeking ordination, Brianna is snatched by one of Jamie’s enemies, and ends up the captive, once more, of the unsinkable Bonnet.
Gold ingots, a corpulent white sow, polyandry, incest, miscegenation, a new time-portal and much backstory augment this installment’s edematous bloat.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-32416-2
Page Count: 992
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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