by Mick Farren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2002
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
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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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
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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