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THE CAPTIVE CONDITION

Name: THE CAPTIVE CONDITION
Author: Kevin P. Keating
ISBN: 978-0-804-16928-8

by Kevin P. Keating ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2015

There’s a substantial gap between the author’s dark vision and the characters who must enact it.

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Keating’s second novel is a study of small-town misery and depravity, with Gothic trimmings.

Normandy Falls is a Rust Belt town bordering the Great Lakes. It has dying industries and a college whose founder, Nathaniel Wakefield, abandoned scholarship for satanic practices and sired 12 “children of sin” whose descendants infect the town. One of the students, who narrates occasionally in the first person before yielding to others' viewpoints, is Edmund Campion, named, puzzlingly, after the English martyr. His faculty adviser, Martin Kingsley, is married but conducting an affair with a townie, Emily Ryan. Emily’s husband, Charlie, is a frequently absent merchant mariner, so Emily must raise their malicious 8-year-old twin daughters alone. The strain has driven her to drink, and early on she’s found floating in her pool, an apparent suicide. Keating’s novel has many similarities to his debut, The Natural Order of Things (2014): the post-industrial town, the lack of a protagonist, the humiliations heaped on his unpleasant characters (even Kingsley’s young son is a “horror-movie toddler”), and the use of hyperbole; over-the-top is Keating’s favorite place. Much of the novel belongs to three dissolute middle-aged men: Charlie Ryan, back for his wife’s funeral; Xavier, chef/owner of the downtown bistro; and the Gonk, the college’s director of maintenance and (shivers) a Wakefield descendant. The Gonk owns an antiquated still, and his moonshine is the main ingredient of a popular drink, The Red Death. (Emily had the recipe.) Its only rival is Xavier’s concoction, a psychedelic juice using the jazar carrot. Keating may not like his characters, but he lingers lovingly on these drinks. He steers the novel erratically toward two murders, a mass drowning, and a “fantastical hellscape” waiting for faculty guests at a New Year’s Eve ceremony.

There’s a substantial gap between the author’s dark vision and the characters who must enact it.

Pub Date: July 7, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-804-16928-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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CARRIE

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1974

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...

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Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).

All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.

King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."

Pub Date: April 8, 1974

ISBN: 0385086954

Page Count: 216

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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NEVER FLINCH
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YOU LIKE IT DARKER
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Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

- SEEN & HEARD
Stephen King Used ‘Carrie’ Advance To Support Mom

- BOOK TO SCREEN
New ‘Carrie’ Series in the Works at Amazon

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.