In Laemmle’s (co-author: Asylum of Insanity, 2016, etc.) horror tale, an evil, sentient ventriloquist doll terrorizes citizens in a secluded mountain town.
Hank Cooper is an environmental scientist in Atomic City, New Mexico, but has ambitions to be a celebrity ventriloquist. Ideally, he thinks, his entire family would become famous for their ventriloquism skills. His wife, Nancy, and their twin 14-year-old children, Jake and Jessie, dismiss his plans, which Hank, an alcoholic, proclaims while drunk. But one day, he stops by a local store called the Hobby Dungeon to buy a ventriloquist doll. As it happens, Woody the Wooden Dummy mysteriously arrived at the shop’s door that very morning. Hank takes Woody home, where it suddenly starts talking to him—all on its own. Woody is crass and insulting—and he soon forms a telepathic link with Hank that allows him to control the man’s body. Woody, as a puppeteer, causes trouble around town, but some people, including Nancy, believe that a drunken Hank has simply gone wild. Then the dummy targets Jake, as well. The Coopers eventually learn Woody’s origin and realize that the doll is possessed by something diabolical and frighteningly methodical. They also suspect that Woody is cooking up an even more sinister scheme. Although Woody is indeed chilling at times, Laemmle’s novel is more of a black comedy than a serious horror tale. The Coopers’ conversations are full of engaging quips and references to pop culture, and Woody’s initial “mind-meld” with Hank is macabre and droll, by turns. The jokes are abundant and generally funny, as when Woody assures Hank that he’s not a problem drinker: “Alcoholics are people who need a drink, and clearly you’ve had plenty.” The evil dummy’s backstory is thorough and coherent, but the explanation is unnecessarily long and somewhat disrupts the pace. Fortunately, the final act regains momentum as Hank and family aim to thwart Woody’s wicked plans. (Although this novel reads as a stand-alone, it launches a prospective series of horror stories set in Atomic City.)
A tale with an unforgettable villain that’s more amusing than scary.Pub Date: May 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-718494-1
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Hannah’s sequel to Firefly Lane (2008) demonstrates that those who ignore family history are often condemned to repeat it.
When we last left Kate and Tully, the best friends portrayed in Firefly Lane, the friendship was on rocky ground. Now Kate has died of cancer, and Tully, whose once-stellar TV talk show career is in free fall, is wracked with guilt over her failure to be there for Kate until her very last days. Kate’s death has cemented the distrust between her husband, Johnny, and daughter Marah, who expresses her grief by cutting herself and dropping out of college to hang out with goth poet Paxton. Told mostly in flashbacks by Tully, Johnny, Marah and Tully’s long-estranged mother, Dorothy, aka Cloud, the story piles up disasters like the derailment of a high-speed train. Increasingly addicted to prescription sedatives and alcohol, Tully crashes her car and now hovers near death, attended by Kate’s spirit, as the other characters gather to see what their shortsightedness has wrought. We learn that Tully had tried to parent Marah after her father no longer could. Her hard-drinking decline was triggered by Johnny’s anger at her for keeping Marah and Paxton’s liaison secret. Johnny realizes that he only exacerbated Marah’s depression by uprooting the family from their Seattle home. Unexpectedly, Cloud, who rebuffed Tully’s every attempt to reconcile, also appears at her daughter’s bedside. Sixty-nine years old and finally sober, Cloud details for the first time the abusive childhood, complete with commitments to mental hospitals and electroshock treatments, that led to her life as a junkie lowlife and punching bag for trailer-trash men. Although powerful, Cloud’s largely peripheral story deflects focus away from the main conflict, as if Hannah was loath to tackle the intractable thicket in which she mired her main characters.
Unrelenting gloom relieved only occasionally by wrenching trauma; somehow, though, Hannah’s storytelling chops keep the pages turning even as readers begin to resent being drawn into this masochistic morass.Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-57721-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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High-stakes weepmeister Sparks (A Walk to Remember, 1999, etc.) opts for a happy ending his fourth time out. His writing has improved—though it's still the equivalent of paint-by-numbers—and he makes use this time of at least a vestige of credible psychology.
That vestige involves the deep dark secret—it has something to do with his father's death when son Taylor was nine—that haunts kind, good 36-year-old local contractor Taylor McAden and makes him withdraw from relationships whenever they start getting serious enough to maybe get permanent. He's done this twice before, and now he does it again with pretty and sweet single mother Denise Holton, age 29, who's moved from Atlanta to Taylor's town of Edenton, North Carolina, in order to devote her time more fully to training her four-year-old son Kyle to overcome the peculiar impediment he has that keeps him from achieving normal language acquisition. Okay? When Denise has a car accident in a bad storm, she's rescued by volunteer fireman Taylor—who also rescues little Kyle after he wanders away from his injured mom in the storm. Love blooms in the weeks that follow—until Taylor suddenly begins putting on the brakes. What is it that holds him back, when there just isn't any question but that he loves Denise and vice versa-not to mention that he's "great" with Kyle, just like a father? It will require a couple of near-death experiences (as fireman Taylor bravely risks his life to save others); emotional steadiness from the intelligent, good, true Denise; and the terrible death of a dear and devoted friend before Taylor will come to the point at last of confiding to Denise the terrible memory of how his father died—and the guilt that's been its legacy to Taylor. The psychological dam broken, love will at last be able to flow.
More Hallmarkiana, from a shameless expert in the genre.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52550-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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