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THE BLOODY RED BARON

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

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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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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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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