In her third outing, southern writer Harper (The Worst Day of My Life, So Far, 2001, etc.) attempts an old-fashioned ghost story set in modern-day New Orleans.
Things start out on a sunny note: Newlyweds Philip Randazzo, five-star chef and owner of Tasso Restaurant, and his beautiful bride, the lovely blonde anthropologist Michelle, sit down to a breakfast prepared for them by Michelle’s teenaged son Cam. But why is the cat freaking out? And why does it make an intolerable fuss whenever the happy couple enjoy conjugal relations? After a strange teenaged boy appears on the stairs during Thanksgiving dinner, Philip suspects the truth: The family is being haunted by Michelle’s former husband, the moderately famous Cajun musician A.P. Savoie, who was killed in a car accident three years before. Michelle, having been through some wacky spiritual experiences in the Yucatan, is game to accept this explanation. Things get weirder. The family ghost appears in visions and dreams, makes a phone call, leaves a note through a video-game screen and even has a sexual experience with the lady of the house via the Jacuzzi in the master bedroom. (What did ghosts do without modern conveniences?) Philip gets jealous, and the two men, the living and the undead, jostle for the role of patriarch. Philip asks advice from an Anne Rice–like novelist, the couple consult a medium (who works by day in the personnel department of the local newspaper) and dally with exorcism (performed by Philip’s brother Dominic, a Catholic priest). They decide the ghostly conduit is a Zippo lighter. They get rid of it. Things calm down. But there’s one last ghostly episode to go, when Savoie returns to aid the most unlikely family member of all.
Harper might have had better luck by sticking to the real travails of blended family life. Her spooks often amount to simple silliness—and her menfolks’ relentless macho posturing often makes one yearn for divine intervention.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101116-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
Categories: PARANORMAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.
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The master of modern horror returns with a loose-knit parapsychological thriller that touches on territory previously explored in Firestarter and Carrie.
Tim Jamieson is a man emphatically not in a hurry. As King’s (The Outsider, 2018, etc.) latest opens, he’s bargaining with a flight attendant to sell his seat on an overbooked run from Tampa to New York. His pockets full, he sticks out his thumb and winds up in the backwater South Carolina town of DuPray (should we hear echoes of “pray”? Or “depraved”?). Turns out he’s a decorated cop, good at his job and at reading others (“You ought to go see Doc Roper,” he tells a local. “There are pills that will brighten your attitude”). Shift the scene to Minneapolis, where young Luke Ellis, precociously brilliant, has been kidnapped by a crack extraction team, his parents brutally murdered so that it looks as if he did it. Luke is spirited off to Maine—this is King, so it’s got to be Maine—and a secret shadow-government lab where similarly conscripted paranormally blessed kids, psychokinetic and telepathic, are made to endure the Skinnerian pain-and-reward methods of the evil Mrs. Sigsby. How to bring the stories of Tim and Luke together? King has never minded detours into the unlikely, but for this one, disbelief must be extra-willingly suspended. In the end, their forces joined, the two and their redneck allies battle the sophisticated secret agents of The Institute in a bloodbath of flying bullets and beams of mental energy (“You’re in the south now, Annie had told these gunned-up interlopers. She had an idea they were about to find out just how true that was"). It’s not King at his best, but he plays on current themes of conspiracy theory, child abuse, the occult, and Deep State malevolence while getting in digs at the current occupant of the White House, to say nothing of shadowy evil masterminds with lisps.
King fans won’t be disappointed, though most will likely prefer the scarier likes of The Shining and It.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-1056-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PARANORMAL FICTION | SUSPENSE | SUPERNATURAL THRILLER
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The Owens sisters are back—not in their previous guise as elderly aunties casting spells in Hoffman’s occult romance Practical Magic (1995), but as fledgling witches in the New York City captured in Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids.
In that magical, mystical milieu, Franny and Bridget are joined by a new character: their foxy younger brother, Vincent, whose “unearthly” charm sends grown women in search of love potions. Heading into the summer of 1960, the three Owens siblings are ever more conscious of their family's quirkiness—and not just the incidents of levitation and gift for reading each other's thoughts while traipsing home to their parents' funky Manhattan town house. The instant Franny turns 17, they are all shipped off to spend the summer with their mother's aunt in Massachusetts. Isabelle Owens might enlist them for esoteric projects like making black soap or picking herbs to cure a neighbor's jealousy, but she at least offers respite from their fretful mother's strict rules against going shoeless, bringing home stray birds, wandering into Greenwich Village, or falling in love. In short order, the siblings meet a know-it-all Boston cousin, April, who brings them up to speed on the curse set in motion by their Salem-witch ancestor, Maria Owens. It spells certain death for males who attempt to woo an Owens woman. Naturally this knowledge does not deter the current generation from circumventing the rule—Bridget most passionately, Franny most rationally, and Vincent most recklessly (believing his gender may protect him). In time, the sisters ignore their mother's plea and move to Greenwich Village, setting up an apothecary, while their rock-star brother, who glimpsed his future in Isabelle’s nifty three-way mirror, breaks hearts like there's no tomorrow. No one's more confident or entertaining than Hoffman at putting across characters willing to tempt fate for true love.
Real events like the Vietnam draft and Stonewall uprising enter the characters' family history as well as a stunning plot twist—delivering everything fans of a much-loved book could hope for in a prequel.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3747-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | PARANORMAL FICTION
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