A curious subcultural tale that somewhat successfully rewrites familiar supernatural themes.
A group of roving suburban lycanthropes struggles to balance order with ferality in this chatty allegory.
The debut novel by Lynn (Theatre and Dance/Univ. of Texas at Austin) is told almost exclusively in dialogue, with the exception of a handful of first-person interludes. This can make it difficult to discern who’s talking to whom in the early pages, but the skeletal plot and declarative chapter titles (“Angel and Susan Make a Plan”) make things straightforward enough: a band of werewolves has been squatting in empty suburban homes, hunkering down long enough to gather food and supplies before police and neighbors get suspicious. Malcolm, the group’s ostensible alpha dog, prescribes careful consideration of the group’s every move, but his authority is challenged by Angel, who has more violent tendencies. Clawing, biting, and worse inevitably ensue, but by werewolf-tale standards, this one is deliberately low on snap and bite and bloodshed. Indeed, though some members of the pack are locked away when they go through a three-day “change,” it’s an open question how much they’re actually changing. The novel is more a study in power dynamics and how, ironically, even wild packs hunger for organization. The dialogue-heavy structure has limits, though. The struggle between Malcom and Angel is relatively inert, and the late chapters’ focus on an exiled member, Bobert, trying to return to the fold feels somewhat digressive. Lynn is strongest when he illuminates the urge to break free from convention in the face of threats. “We’re waking up that part of our brains…instead of waiting for the plague or whatever happens next in history,” one member says. The book is not quite Orwell, but it’s an offbeat glimpse into how resistance to conformity breeds its own kind of conformity. As one of the “rules” puts it, “Eventually everyone will be a werewolf.”
A curious subcultural tale that somewhat successfully rewrites familiar supernatural themes.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-476-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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