A prosperous beginning for San Francisco-based reporter and stage critic Moore.
In 1984, high-school sophomore Eric Sperling died during a car accident with his violently upset buddy Tom Linden at the wheel. Fifteen years later, in purgatory, Eric’s lonely ghost still hangs about Calaveras beach in South Los Angeles, trying to haunt Tom—who actually murdered Eric, who wants vengeance. Vengeance may consist of awakening Tom to the foulness of his deed in murdering his friend, although Tom has spent some years in jail for the death he caused while smashed out of his mind. Throughout the story, we know only that it happened in a car that struck the back end of a big truck. Eric has never seen another spirit like himself, although he’s become a spiritual Jewish being who studies in purgatory, in purgatory, in purgatory, a set of the 20-volume Zohar. In fact, he reads a lot in nearby libraries, and his tale illustrates an aspect of Jewish mysticism. He also has some physical abilities—to make floors creak, slam doors, even to float high over the beach. Back in their high-school days, Tom’s alcoholic father died by falling off a fishing boat and striking his head on the prop. Tom lives with his German-American mother and has been sucked into the violent mindset of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. He slips LSD into a teacher’s coffee and is later expelled for a year. Repellent though Tom is, Rachel falls for him and becomes his lover. Then Rachel accepts Eric as a lover as well, and when Tom finds out he kills Eric. While much of the story offers a big mix of secondary cultural figures, it turns on Tom’s character, his hardening in prison, his strange later life as he becomes his father, lies around stoned and drunk and shielded by booze from even seeing or hearing Eric until the unbearable moment comes when the dead boy appears before him.
A first novel that deserved hardcovers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1196-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
Categories: PARANORMAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
21
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Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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Leaving Viking for the storied literary patina of Scribner, current or not, King seemingly strives on the page for a less vulgar gloss. And he eases from horror into romantic suspense, while adding dollops of the supernatural. The probable model: structural echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca do sound forth, although King never writes one paragraph herein to match du Maurier’s opening moonscapes of Manderley. What comes through nevertheless is a strong pull to upgrade his style and storytelling in this his 50th year. Yes, he actually does write better if with less energy and power than in Desperation (1996). In fact, attacking the race problem in lily-white Maine, he even assumes an almost Dreiserian seriousness in his final paragraphs. Well, the story: romantic-suspense novelist Michael Noonan, who summers in Castle Rock on Dark Score Lake, falls into a four-year writer’s block when his wife Johanna dies of a brain blowout. Now 40 and childless, Mike has salted away four extra novel manuscripts in his safe-deposit box, one of them 11 years old (shades of Richard Bachman!), and keeps up a pretense of productivity by publishing a “new” novel each year. Meanwhile, he finds himself falling for Mattie Devore, a widowed mother half his age. Mattie’s late husband is the son of still-thriving half-billionaire computer king Max Devore, 85 years old and monstrous, who plans to gain possession of Mattie’s three-year-old daughter, the banally drawn Kyra. Mike’s first big question: Did Johanna cuckold him during his long hours writing? If so, will her character reverse our understanding of her, as does Rebecca de Winter’s? And how can he help Mattie fight off Max and keep Kyra? The supernatural elements, largely reserved for the interracial climax, are Standard King but fairly mild. Philosophically limited but a promising artistic shift for a writer who tried something like this with 1995’s failure, Rose Madder.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85350-7
Page Count: 529
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Categories: PARANORMAL FICTION
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