Ignoring part six, Bailey’s book will remind readers of human connectivity, while it frightens and entertains.
A creative effort takes horror to new heights in well-paced, semi-interconnected stories.
Novelist, short story author and poet Bailey’s (Phoenix Rose, 2009) first novel, a finalist in the Independent Publisher Book Awards for horror fiction, is contemporary literary horror, an energizing departure from gothic or romantic pastiche and genre favorites of witches, creatures and demonic spirits. Bailey’s horror is family drama, where both compassionate and abusive relationships anchor characters in environments that are at best uncertain and often harrowing and cruel. In unusually symbolic prose that may attract or repel genre enthusiasts, the book’s six parts tell of a young father’s struggle with suicide, the violent source of a couple’s marital dysfunction, superlative child abuse in an orphanage, a psychiatrist treating a paranormal patient and school-aged friends thwarting a bully. The book’s strengths are its suspense, the subtle way the narratives connect through chance and the peripheral appearance of a young woman named Julie. Bailey has a good sense of timing and when plot should accelerate; the suspense is palpable and enjoyable, even when the story is gruesome. Despite the different situations of his characters, most voices come across as vaguely post-adolescent and male—impetuous, reactionary and overly concerned with sex and bodily functions. There’s a lot of talk of bed-wetting and toned, lascivious young women like Julie, whose name also appears in emboldened text throughout the book. The reader is intended to pull a sixth story, that of Julie and her daughter, “Palindrome Hannah,” from this text. However, this is nearly impossible, as the text is a pronoun-heavy syntactical forest, with ideas continuing across tens of pages. Bailey’s literary creativity is an exciting turn for the genre, but it bears too heavily on the book. Infusing a story with palindromes can be flashy in short form, but drawn-out in a novel, it feels washed out and contributes little to the storytelling. In naming his book after a thin plot device and thinner character, Bailey seems to not know his own strengths.
Ignoring part six, Bailey’s book will remind readers of human connectivity, while it frightens and entertains.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466243750
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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