A moving first novel, about family life and its challenges and discontents, from an acclaimed short-story writer (The Summer Before the Summer of Love, 1995, etc.). It's the story of the Keller family of Madison, Wisconsin, throughout the 1960s and, briefly, afterward—especially during the watershed year 1963, when 12-year-old Suzanne Keller's high-strung mother Helen (that's right), helplessly mourning the death of her idol John F. Kennedy, retreats into the pattern of depression and eccentricity believed to date from her adolescence, when Helen's parents were killed in an automobile accident. The novel thereafter weaves forward and backward in time, as Suzanne (who narrates) recalls and evaluates her beautiful, unstable mother's effects on her patient husband Glen (a curious, conscientious optometrist), Suzanne'sclothes-and-boycrazy older sister Bonnie, and a vividly characterized clutch of neighbors and best friends, including a farmhouse full of disapproving paternal in-laws whose intolerant views of the free-spirited Helen emerge during a stingingly evoked Thanksgiving dinner. Swick's beautifully controlled plot shifts into high gear when Helen ``escapes'' with Suzanne in tow on an unannounced trip to her Nebraska hometown, and especially as the latter begins to piece together the long-buried facts of her mother's girlhood losses and later traumas. The car trip episode is perhaps a trifle too reminiscent of Mona Simpson's Anywhere But Here, and Swick's generally successful use of '60s touchstone movies and music and culture references to denote specific years betray her into what seem like anachronisms (was the term ``wimp'' around much in 1963? was the phrase ``it really sucks'' really current in 1969?). These are the only blemishes on a novel that renders the stuttering momentum of family dynamics with equally warm emotion and relentless clarity. A heartening breakthrough into the longer form by a writer who's already a short-story master, and grows more accomplished with each book she produces. (Regional author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017434-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic "The Monkey's Paw"—a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here—as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the "Pet Sematary": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death—especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's "annex"—an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex—resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt—when dead Timmy Baterman was "transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?" Will Gage return to the living—but as "a thing of evil?" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise—and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1983
ISBN: 0743412281
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983
BOOK TO SCREEN
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