A terrific read for those looking for thrills, romance and some bite.
A loner with a secret disorder meets a gang of outlaw vampires in this captivating, violent thriller.
Fairview, Va., high-school junior Nicholas spends his time working at the local comic shop and dodging disgruntled bullies, all the while hiding that he is an albino who uses hair dye and contact lenses. The son of a pill-popping mother and an abusive father, Nicholas leads a gloomy life and turns to art and fantasy fiction when things get tough. Meanwhile, a half-dozen vampires exiled from the West Coast arrive in town hungry for blood. Caught in the middle of a tussle at a video arcade, Nicholas catches the attention of the bloodsuckers, especially Alexis, a young female with a rebellious spirit and a romantic streak. Alexis disobeys orders to kill Nicholas, introducing him instead to the wonders of sexual intimacy and the advantages that come with eternal life. After the bodies start to pile up, the police, in true Hitchcock style, begin to suspect that Nicholas is one of the killers. First-time author Damanda displays remarkable control over the action of the somewhat familiar story, effortlessly moving the point of view from his alienated hero to the thirsty leader of the vampires and, late in the book, to Frank Gillis, a dishonored sheriff's deputy who sympathizes with Nicholas’s dilemma. The novel’s final showdown between the monsters and the humans is a fantastic set piece that takes place in a juvenile-detention center as the vampires make zombies out of dangerous teen felons. A fast, relentless pace and an offbeat sense of humor–Alexis and her immortal friends travel in a vintage Econoline van with the disco hit “Staying Alive” playing on the radio–elevate the story above standard horror fare. Despite a level of gore that is sometimes gratuitous and a few distasteful plot twists, Damanda maintains a spooky tone and a dangerous edge that never lets up.
A terrific read for those looking for thrills, romance and some bite.Pub Date: June 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-432-70680-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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