Entertaining in fits and starts.
Two Rhode Island potentates, one fading, one in the ascendant, wreak varying forms of mischief on a dark corner of New Hampshire, and a mousy bank employee discovers her inner exhibitionist.
In The Egg Code (2002), Heppner tackled the Internet and the American mind. The targets are a little (but not a lot) more manageable here as the friends and enemies of Nathaniel Pike, one of America’s richest men, try to figure out what fabulous—or fabulously nefarious—idea he has in mind for the seven-and-a-half acres of White Mountain wilderness he’s just purchased from the federal government. What he has in mind is a bit of grand-scale Dadaist installation. He’s going to level his bit of forest and put in a completely inaccessible parking lot. It’s all perfectly legal, but it is enough to send the local environmentalists into seizures. Heppner’s characters are oddballs and hangers-on, the oddest being his factotum, Stuart Breen. Stuart, the author of a disregarded novel, has been distracted from his usual efficiency by his entry into the nerve-wracking world of exhibitionism, for which the tour guide has been Stuart’s mousy wife, Marlene. The couple have been stripping to the buff in all sorts of inappropriate places, and Stuart occasionally waves his willy independently. Nearby, the closeted, patrician Gregg Reese maneuvers toward public subsidy of the family charitable fund he and his bossy mother have managed to deplete entirely in their support of civic goodness. Gregg’s daughter Allison and her moviemaking boyfriend Heath have drifted into Pike’s orbit. Heath soon turns his lens on the kinky life of Marlene Breen, and Allison has a fling with the anti-development forces who will shift into high gear as Pike appends a completely equipped K-Mart to his paved wilderness. Oh, and the wicked origins of the Reese fortune come to light.
Entertaining in fits and starts.Pub Date: March 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41289-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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