The ninth and first hardcover installment in the bestselling paperback series Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. At a slightly future date when the FBI and other police organizations admit the existence of vampires, witches, zombies, etc., Anita Blake’s job is to kill monsters—though she considers herself one as well. Anita has been a vampire’s lover, a werewolf’s mate, a zombie queen, and for the past year has been learning ritual magic and methods for animating the dead. Meanwhile, the humorless Anita is quite analytic and tiresomely long-winded; one reads on and on waiting for her to shut up and for something to happen. Finally, Anita is called to Santa Fe by her old monster buddy, Edward, who works under the name “Ted Forrester” as a bounty hunter licensed to kill varmints such as lycanthropes (a legal activity in rancher-run states like New Mexico). Edward is hundreds of years old but as “Ted” is engaged to marry late-thirtyish Donna Parnell, mother of two. Anita is stunned and angry about what she sees as a breach in the monster code, though she too lusts to have an affair with a normal human. Edward/Ted needs Anita’s help on a tough case. He takes her to a hospital where several victims lie flayed but still alive; a serial mutilator has expertly stripped them of their skin and eyelids, leaving no knife marks, then brutally ripped off their noses, penises, testicles, and breasts. How have these meat-naked bodies resisted infection? Who could do such a dastardly thing? The answers, which do not come quickly, bring forward lots of monsters, including a blue-eyed, blond werejaguar who can slip out of his skin and whose wounds heal as fast as a vampire’s. The story takes a long time to get going, but once it does Hamilton sets a good pace and weaves a nifty tapestry of glowy-eyed monsters against a background of blood.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-441-00684-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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