A film buff's dream wrapped in the decadence and glamour of a bygone era.
In Giles’ (Love Lies Bleeding, 2015) novel, the ghost of actress Olive Thomas recounts her previous life as a model, chorus girl, and silent-film star.
The spirit of the actress haunts Manhattan’s New Amsterdam Theatre, once the home of the Ziegfeld Follies, in which Olive performed. The apparition recollects her modest beginnings in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, getting married too young, and working as a shopgirl in New York where she’s “discovered” and becomes a model for artists such as Howard Chandler Christy and Harrison Fisher. After using her connections to become a Ziegfeld Girl, she performs in both the Follies and the more risqué rooftop Frolic; she also begins an affair with her married boss, Florenz Ziegfeld. After he refuses to leave his family for her, Olive takes a heartbroken trip to California, where she meets Jack Pickford, the notorious playboy and brother of Mary Pickford, and they have an exciting yet volatile marriage. Her beauty and enthusiasm open many doors into the world of silent film; however, she struggles with Jack’s alcoholism and indiscriminate infidelities. These dalliances inadvertently bring about her early end; she accidentally drinks a mercury solution, her husband’s syphilis treatment. Though a tragic figure, Olive unapologetically indulges in the excess of the early 20th century by being sassy, savvy but never cynical, and sexually vibrant. Giles employs an easy style and modest creative license backed by obsessive research. The book’s only noteworthy shortcoming is its failure to explore one of Olive’s more noteworthy claims to fame: her early death was one of the first heavily publicized scandals, and as a ghost, the starlet would have been uniquely positioned to comment on it. That said, nearly every page features at least a passing reference, if not an appearance, by a Hollywood legend, from the Pickfords to the Selznicks to F. Scott Fitzgerald. These are joined by lesser-remembered figures such as actors Blanche Ring and George Chesebro and the cross-dressing performer Julian Eltinge. The author includes an impressive reading list to explore these personalities further.
A film buff's dream wrapped in the decadence and glamour of a bygone era.Pub Date: July 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9947349-0-7
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Sepia Stories Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends,...
Before sobriety, Catherine "Cat" Coombs had it all: fun friends, an exciting job, and a love affair with alcohol. Until she blacked out one more time and woke up in a stranger’s bed.
By that time, “having it all” had already devolved into hiding the extent of her drinking from everyone she cared about, including herself. Luckily for Cat, the stranger turned out to be Jason Halliwell, a rather delicious television director marking three years, eight months, and 69 days of sobriety. Inspired by Jason—or rather, inspired by the prospect of a romantic relationship with this handsome hunk—Cat joins him at AA meetings and embarks on her own journey toward clarity. But sobriety won’t work until Cat commits to it for herself. Their relationship is tumultuous, as Cat falls off the wagon time and again. Along the way, Cat discovers that the cold man she grew up endlessly failing to please was not her real father, and with his death, her mother’s secret escapes. So she heads for Nantucket, where she meets her drunken dad and two half sisters—one boisterously welcoming and the other sulkily suspicious—and where she commits an unforgivable blunder. Years later, despairing of her persistent relapses, Jason has left Cat, taking their daughter with him. Finally, painfully, Cat gets clean. Green (Saving Grace, 2014, etc.) handles grim issues with a sure hand, balancing light romance with tense family drama. She unflinchingly documents Cat’s humiliations under the influence and then traces her commitment to sobriety. Simultaneously masking the motivations of those surrounding our heroine, Green sets up a surprising karmic lesson.
As she seeks to repair bridges, Cat awakens anger and treachery in the hearts of those she once betrayed. Making amends, like addiction, may endanger her future.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04734-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Twenty New England horror shorts by Stephen King (and a painfully lofty introduction by old pro John D. MacDonald). King, of course, is the 30-year-old zillionaire who poured the pig's blood on Carrie, woke the living dead in 'Salem's Lot, and gave a bad name to precognition in The Shining. The present collection rounds up his magazine pieces, mainly from Cavalier, and also offers nine stories not previously published. He is as effective in the horror vignette as in the novel. His big opening tale, "Jerusalem's Lot"—about a deserted village—is obviously his first shot at 'Salem's Lot and, in its dependence on a gigantic worm out of Poe and Lovecraft, it misses the novel's gorged frenzy of Vampireville. But most of the other tales go straight through you like rats' fangs. "Graveyard Shift" is about cleaning out a long unused factory basement that has a subbasement—a hideous colony of fat giant blind legless rats that are mutating into bats. It's a story you may wish you hadn't read. You'll enjoy the laundry mangle that becomes possessed and begins pressing people into bedsheets (don't think about that too much), a flu bug that destroys mankind and leaves only a beach blanket party of teenagers ("Night Surf"), and a beautiful lady vampire and her seven-year-old daughter abroad in a Maine blizzard ("One for the Road"). Bizarre dripperies, straight out of Tales from the Crypt comics. . . a leprous distillation.
Pub Date: Jan. 20, 1977
ISBN: 0385129912
Page Count: 367
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1977
BOOK TO SCREEN
Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” to Be Epix Show
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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