by Kim Newman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 14, 1994
Newman's fifth horror/thriller lives up to both the best and the worst of his earlier novels. Like Anno-Dracula (1993), The Quorum is a modern vampire myth, complete with a dark overlord (Derek Leech)—a combination of Swamp-thing, Aphrodite (he emerges complete from the mucky, polluted Thames), and Pinocchio (his goal is to fulfill his function as catalyst for betrayal and thus earn his right to be human, which is manifested at the end of the novel when he finally achieves a sense of smell). Unlike the bloodfest in Anno-Dracula, the horror in this book is psychological. Leech proposes a Mephistophelian deal to three young men (Mark, Mickey, and Michael, who make up the Quorum): If they spend the first six weeks of every year systematically torturing their friend Neil, they will be rewarded for his suffering with fame and fortune. For 15 years everyone sticks by The Deal (although Mark, more of a Faustus than the others, does try to withdraw at one point). Leech becomes a media magnate, Michael a TV celebrity, Mickey a rock star, Mark a comic-strip creator. The book moves back and forth in time, showing us how the Quorum ruins Neil's pitiful life. We see the present through the eyes of Sally Rhodes, a single mother (she calls her child ``The Invader'') and small-time private eye. Sally is a new breed of female detective: in love with the process of digging for information, capable of calculatingly seizing an opportunity but also of excessive righteous indignation. She is as interesting as Leech and, like him, woefully underused and underdeveloped. The low stakes are the undoing of this story, and most of the Quorum's schemes for torturing Neil are turgid and banal. For amateur theologians and a few flagellants, the ruminations on the true nature of sacrifice might be of interest; for everyone else, a yawn.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0132-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
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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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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