Overburdened, but a daring mix of Jules Verne and the vampire genre.
Third in Farren’s vampire series featuring Victor Renquist (begun with The Time of Feasting, 1996)—although Victor prefers the term “nosferatu” to vampire.
In Darklost (2000), Farren decided to branch off into Lovecraft’s Cthulhu myth, as have dozens of horror fantasists sucking up the Providence master’s purple tints, but he kept the bigger Cthulhu ploys in reserve for Underland. Here, Renquist finds himself kidnapped from Washington’s Watergate complex and bound to a mechanical chair in the bowels of the NSA’s Paranormal Warfare Facility, a laser ready to beam into his brain through an eyeball. As it happens, the 100-year-old Director of the PWF, Herbert Walker Grael, who has his own semi-immortality serum to keep him pumped up and running (with a big Viagra charge thrown in), wants Victor’s help in standing up to, even siphoning off the paranormal powers of, the Cthulhu, a subterranean intelligence first contacted by Apogee’s Council of Nine, who were defeated in the previous installment. First, though, Victor is given Thyme Bridewell (four times dead and returned) to feast from in order to regain his strength. He likes Thyme, who has micro-circuitry implanted in her brain, doesn’t drain her, and, in fact, leaves her as a darklost, halfway between human and nosferatu. Then Grael reveals his object. It seems that the Nazis discovered an Underworld in the Arctic and by 1947 had built flying saucers that operated out of their belowground base. Renquist must now lead a team down under. At Ice Station Zebra in Greenland, the team meets Nazi Underlanders who take them aboard a flying saucer for the journey’s last leg and a Tour of the Fissure, or Underland, a cavern as deep and wide as the Grand Canyon that zigzags about the planet and is connected by trains and monorails. Here is a whole civilization that worships the Serpent, or Dhrakuh, a Central Mind tied to the original Nephilim visitors from outer space.
Overburdened, but a daring mix of Jules Verne and the vampire genre.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30321-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
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