Blending outrÇ-dimensional, drooly-tentacled, Lovecraftian slipslop weirdness with Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters, Laidlaw (Kalifornia, 1993, etc.) lays out a work far more fine- grained than Heinlein's and nearly as compelling as Lovecraft's. San Francisco hack writer Derek Crowe stumbles onto a gold mine when his latest book attracts the interest of Eli Mooney, an elderly wheelchair-bound astral voyager who invites him home. Mooney's the real thing, a seeming crackpot whose phantasmal travels have made him the channel for invading forces shaped like mandalas—``elaborate wheels with wavering arms and spiral centers.'' Aside from three arcane histories that the mandalas have dictated to him, he also owns the skin of a dead Cambodian imprinted with 37 mandalas that focus the invaders' powers. Mooney begins dictating to Crowe, then dies, and so Crowe romps off with the skin and earlier dictation. Published, the evil mandalas make Crowe a famed New Ager, although his The Mandala Rites perverts Mooney's hard-earned fatalism with fluffy New Age optimism. Himself still not believing in Mooney, Crowe writhes ``in the hair shirt of his occult hypocrisy, writing books for the praise of people he considers imbeciles.'' On a book-signing trip in North Carolina, Crowe hypnotizes Lenore, a hippie math genius, and accidentally channels in the 37th mandala, an astral jellyfish that sticks to her head. Lenore and her housemate Michael follow Crowe to San Francisco, where Club Mandala becomes the host center for the mandala invasion that Crowe doesn't believe in. While painting himself into a corner plotwise, Laidlaw strives to resolve Crowe's dilemma at the same keenly drawn level on which it is presented. Stick-fast storytelling and brilliant discursive detail about occultism. Deserves high marks indeed—and those mandalas cry out for celluloid computerization.
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13021-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
D°az's first collection of ten stories, some having appeared in the New Yorker and Story, is certain to draw attention for its gritty view of life in the barrios of the Dominican Republic and rough neighborhoods of urban New Jersey. Most of the stories are linked by their narrator, who spent his first nine years in the D.R., until his father in the States brought the entire family to South Jersey, where he continued to display the survivalist machismo he developed during years of poverty, scamming, and struggle. In the Caribbean pieces, D°az offers a boy's-eye view of a hardscrabble life. In ``Ysrael,'' the narrator and his brother, sent to the countryside during the summer, plot to unmask a local oddity, a boy whose face was eaten off by a pig in his youth. Much later in the volume, ``No Face'' reappears, surviving the taunts of the locals as he waits for his trip to America, where surgeons will work on his face. ``Arguantando'' documents life in the barrio, where the narrator, his brother, and his mother eke out an existence while hearing nothing from the father. ``Negocios'' explains why: Robbed of his savings in the US, the father schemes to marry a citizen in order to become one himself, all the time thinking of his family back home. He is hardly a saint, and, reunited in New Jersey, the family is dominated by his violent temper. ``Fiesta, 1980'' recalls the narrator's bouts of car sickness, for which his father shows no sympathy. In the remaining tales, a teenaged Dominican drug dealer in New Jersey dreams of a normal life with his crackhead girlfriend (``Aurora''); a high-school dealer is disturbed by his best friend's homosexuality (``Drown''); and ``How to Date . . .'' is a fractured handbook on the subtleties of interracial dating. D°az's spare style and narrative poise make for some disturbing fiction, full of casual violence and indifferent morality. A debut calculated to raise some eyebrows.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-041-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Yellow Wallpaper meets Rosemary’s Baby in a slim, wonderfully eerie novel.
In a decidedly creepy departure from her debut (Saturn’s Return to New York, 2001: a charmer about mothers and daughters in literary New York), Gran tells of a young woman possessed by a demon.
Amanda narrates as she describes her own frightening decline from a young, happily married architect to a woman she barely recognizes, possessed by the ancient demon Naamah. It begins imperceptibly at first—strange tapping sounds in her loft, increasing discord between her and husband Ed, her taking up cigarettes—but all these things are explained away by common sense: the loft is old and squeaks, she and Ed need more quality time together, stress at work has drawn her back to a bad habit. Perfectly reasonable, but in retrospect Amanda sees these inconsequential changes as signs of the demon taking hold of her. She dreams of Naamah: she and the demon wade in a sea of blood, Naamah, with beautiful black hair and pointy teeth, promises that she will always love Amanda and never leave. Early on, Amanda mail-orders a book on architecture, but instead she’s sent a volume on demon possession. As the months progress, she is able to answer yes to nearly all of the questions under the heading “Are You Possessed by a Demon?” She begins seducing rough men, stealing, lying, almost drowns a child while on holiday, and then commits murder. But instead of taking a more conventional route—like turning to the law—Gran smartly puts the focus inward. For Amanda, the loss of herself, in both body and mind, is far worse than the committing of these horrible crimes. She seeks help, but her doctor and psychiatrist seem to be demons themselves and Amanda begins to see demons everywhere. The tale, fast-paced and claustrophobic, raises a frightening question: Amanda could be going insane, but, in the final analysis, what’s the difference?
The Yellow Wallpaper meets Rosemary’s Baby in a slim, wonderfully eerie novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56947-328-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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