A gruesome slasher story that mainly rests on genre tropes rather than using them to create fully developed characters and...
A killer haunts a Texas town full of mysteries in this debut novel.
A string of brutal attacks rocks the isolated community of Glen Haven. Known as the Goatman, thanks to his animal skull mask, the murderer leaves a single survivor of each assault—a group of women who have banded together into a club. These traumatized yet resilient women want revenge and capture the killer during the book’s first chapter. They must now decide whether to turn the Goatman over to the proper authorities or administer their own justice. Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Christoph Edison arrives in town to help Texas Ranger Emmitt Maverick investigate the homicides. The fastidious and intelligent Edison learns that Glen Haven has a history of enigmatic happenings, culminating in a surreal vision of a spectral figure called “Mr. Nobody” at a rural crime scene. The work also tells each survivor’s story in sequences that will be familiar to horror aficionados. Cat Bachman was making a documentary about a witchcraft-tinged murder (her tale is told through found footage watched by Edison). Anne survived a college camping trip loaded with sex and booze; Autumn endured a break-in in the middle of a boathouse party full of teenage relationship drama. Breakfield’s premise is intriguing, but each character’s thread is ultimately swamped by genre references. Teen slasher flicks, The Blair Witch Project, and Twin Peaks are all lovingly imitated, but overall the novel seems content to repeat familiar beats rather than use homages to further build its own story. The players—almost all incredibly good-looking—are not defined much past their “types,” which can render their dialogue awkward and flat. The author’s more original ideas—whether an overarching plot device such as a Survivor’s Club or a simple striking image like an eerie wall of stones with a breathing mouth—are undoubtedly promising. Hopefully, Breakfield will trust his creative instincts in his next outing.
A gruesome slasher story that mainly rests on genre tropes rather than using them to create fully developed characters and scenarios.Pub Date: July 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-92168-5
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Bifrost Universe
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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