Distinguished by an engaging voice, but the action doesn’t quite come to a head, and the serious parts aren’t as deft as the...
A vividly drawn, good-humored, yet ultimately unsurprising coming-of-age tale set in small-town Georgia.
Sumner (Polite Society, 1995) has an appealing narrator in Louise Peppers, a wild southern girl with a penchant for vanilla extract and other strong liquors. In a short preface, Louise explains that the story will end with her “in the Wapanog County Jail on the night after I was supposed to marry Zane Wilder”; she then circles back to fill in the gaps between that moment and her childhood. Seven-year-old Louise belongs to a middle-class family in decidedly working-class Counterpoint, Georgia. Her successful but overly cautious father Henry keeps telling her, “Remember who you are. You are a Peppers”; her mother Florida loves Jesus more than she does anyone; and her brother Roderick is severely asthmatic. In their world, “God is white, upper-middle-class, and Southern Baptist,” and eccentricity is the rule. But after Roderick’s sudden death, the story swerves into darker regions. Henry buries his head in his job as the general manager of a corrugated-board plant; Florida turns even more intensely to Jesus; and Louise sails into adolescence stuffing herself with Oreos and alcohol. Her teenage years make for a bumpy ride. She takes a job at her father’s plant and gets her sexual initiation from T.C. Curtis, a coarse Monte Carlo–driving lug. Eventually she runs away and joins a traveling carnival, where she hangs out with freaks, pursues her dream of becoming a clown, and hooks up with the aforementioned Zane Wilder, a carnie who swallows fire. The story’s main appeal lies in its eccentric cast: the morbid grandparents, the wacky mother, the lewd carnies. And Louise’s narration sounds like a southern-grotesque parody of Jane Eyre, replacing “Reader, I married him” with “All events fall short of their anticipation; my wedding was no exception.”
Distinguished by an engaging voice, but the action doesn’t quite come to a head, and the serious parts aren’t as deft as the comedy.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2001
ISBN: 1-56512-286-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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