A savage tale of parenthood and squandered hope from an author whose unsparing eye never ceases to subvert the mundane.
A man goes in search of his addict son only to end up lost in his own relentless crises.
Hunter (Ugly Girls, 2014, etc.) focuses on the grotesque and unlovable in this novel that spreads like a wildfire from West Virginia down to the verdant sludge that is Florida. Meet Greg Reinart—retired accountant, compulsive overeater, 58 going on dead (if he doesn’t change his diet). His second wife, Deb, is also a retired accountant, but whereas Greg is a slovenly presence in their home, Deb is immaculately manicured, motivated, and somewhat removed, yet in a pleasant way, like a host on an HGTV show, “nothing worrisome; nothing out of place.” His son, GJ, a grown man with a harrowing drug addiction, has been missing for three weeks. Because GJ has always “felt as elusive and slippery as his own beating heart,” Greg commits to “never, ever stop looking” for his son. And so, with trepidation, Greg embarks on a precipitous search and leaves his safe home in West Virginia to RV it to his spark plug of an ex-wife Marie’s Orlando condo. While Hunter's commanding narrative hurtles forward, it also pauses to coast as Greg ruminates on his complicated past, which we come to discover motivates his own morbid obsessions. The reproachful voice of his late mother pervades his consciousness, but often, her character feels archetypal, undermining Hunter’s lurid prose with trite remarks such as, “Now it’s time for you to be a man and support your family.” Tortured by his insatiable hunger—for food, alcohol, belonging, affirmation—Greg has been made to feel inconsequential by time and fatherhood. And it gradually becomes clear that GJ might be better off on his own, outside the vortex of his father’s misery. When Marie joins Greg on his futile hunt for redemption, their messy relationship, like an alligator wakened from its slumber, pulls the story toward darker waters.
A savage tale of parenthood and squandered hope from an author whose unsparing eye never ceases to subvert the mundane.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14615-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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