That nudge-nudge wink-wink title should clue you in to a tongue-in-cheek mystery. Make that scroll-in-cheek. During a 1996 dig in the Valley of the Kings, a professor of Egyptology comes into possession of some large and almost perfectly preserved scrolls. As he writes in the introduction to his vernacular translation of the first one: ``You are about to read the first detective story in the history of the world.'' The scroll's first- person narrator is Eye, Grand Vizier of Thebes, who is given a possibly dangerous assignment by his 18-year-old grandson, the god- pharaoh Tutankhamen. Eye is ordered to discover—in just seven days—who killed Tut's father, the wicked pharaoh Akhenaten, eight years ago. There are, it seems, plenty of suspects. Was it the beautiful Nefertiti, Eye's daughter and Tut's mother? Physician Yuti? High Priest Aanen? General of the Infantry Horemeb? Tut's wife Ankhesenamun? Tut himself? In traditional private-detective style, Eye sandshoes from one suspect to another. But on the seventh day he has to serve a munificent banquet to the elite of Thebes and reveal to his king whodunit. Eye finds himself in the infamous rock-hard place, of course, but he's a survivor. . . . With out-of-place sprinklings of contemporary slang (``shmuck'' is one of the cleaner expressions), an offbeat debut that will probably strike readers as either a clever hoot or way too coy. The ending sets up the possible ``translation'' of a second scroll.
Pub Date: June 10, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14274-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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