At this length, Hamilton goes really big time. But between spells of grisly melodrama and enjoyable monsterology, the main...
Twelfth entry and fourth hardcover in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series.
Vampires now have rights and restrictions. But it’s amazing how so many humans survive in an alternate-world St. Louis, what with all the vamp packs, wereleopards, werewolves, the lone werefox, and animated zombies bleeding folks dry or ripping up bodies. Supernatural serial killers have become Blake’s stock-in-trade (Seduced by Moonlight, 2003, etc.) while she tries to straighten out her romantic sex life (when she’s not celibate). Sexy Anita has three otherworldly boyfriends, since Richard Zeeman, the Wolf-King to whom she was engaged, dumped her because she’s homier with monsters than he. She and Micah Callahan are Queen and King of the wereleopards, though she’s more consort than wife until the climactic sex scene. Strippers are being murdered by rogue vamps while Anita suffers endlessly from her complicated love life, chastely sleeping with handsome 20-year-old Nathaniel, her pomme de sang, while fighting off her ardeur, or beastly libido. Under the ardeur when her beloved Master Vampire, Jean-Claude, feeds, she tastes the blood, and when Richard brings down a deer, its meat slides down her throat. The ardeur also leads to plenty of hot sex, all steam and mind-pumping passion, but often leading to metaphysical whammies. Heading the killer pack is older Vittorio, who is strong enough to hide his acts from the Church of Eternal Rest and even from the Master of the City, ex-lover Jean-Claude.
At this length, Hamilton goes really big time. But between spells of grisly melodrama and enjoyable monsterology, the main device here is that irritable Anita gets along with nobody and bitches at great length with everyone she meets, at times for whole chapters of filler—and it’s not even midlife crisis.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-425-19824-3
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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