Vampire-battle aces let slip the bats of war in this superior sequel to Anno-Dracula (1993), itself a benchmark for vampire fiction. This time out, Newman moves ahead 30 years to focus on the European air war and stalemate in 1918. Driven from England, Graf von Dracula rises to commander-in-chief of the armies of Germany and Austria-Hungary, fathers a species of German vampire aristocrats, and becomes ringmaster of Baron Manfred von Richthofen's Flying Circus, a group of night-flying vampire aces. Strange experiments involving the Red Baron take place at Chateau du Malinbois, and the British vampire squadron, Cundall's Condors, must discover just what the Germans are up to. Meanwhile, it's a weird bunch of doctors who experiment on the superpowerful batmen—H.G. Wells's vivisectionist Dr. Moreau, filmdom's nutty Dr. Caligari, and Professor Ten Brincken—and who convert the shape-shifters into living airplanes with 30-foot batwingspreads. Writing the life of the Baron is Edgar Allan Poe, who was himself turned into a vampire by his child bride, Virginia, and once suffered premature burial when found "dead'' in Baltimore. The Diogenes Club, England's Star Chamber led by Mycroft Holmes, sends Lt. Edwin Winthrop to gather intelligence with Cundall's Condors, and Winthrop finds himself falling for 50-year-old undead journalist Kate Reed. Among the attractions here are gripping battlefield scenes and dogfights; vast physiological detail about vampire breeds and bloodlines (vampires drink moonlight for strength); savagely intimate, even alluring descriptions of bloodlust; the ripping gallows humor of the British vampire aces; and memory-jogging walk-ons—including Jiggs from Faulkner's Pylon, Allard from The Shadow, Jules and Jim, Jake Barnes, Clifford Chatterley, Dr. Arrowsmith, Jed Leland from Citizen Kane, Bruno Satchel from The Blue Max, Mata Hari, Lola-Lola from The Blue Angel, and Cigarette from Under Two Flags. Superbly researched mud-and-blood: Newman's rich novel rises above genre, though delighted bat-readers will still cry, "Fangs for the memory!''
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 978-0671854515
Page Count: 358
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
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.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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