Intolerance and archetypal horror entwine like snakes in this gripper set in the Canadian Rockies: a first from Scottish TV broadcaster Gray. Sam Hunt, born Sam Hunting Wolf, denies his Kuinchinkic inheritance and language, runs off from his family and reservation at age 15, now lives with whites, and has been happily married for ten years. Sam's secret: He wears an amulet that sets him aside as the shaman who must defend the Siouan tribes against the Tricksteran evil fiend once buried in Wolf Mountain but released from its prison in 1907 when Scottish railroad gangs blew holes in the mountain while building the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. Sam's grandfather and father were also the shamans defending the tribes against the Trickster. Now the Trickster is back and bloodying the slopes where Sam works as a manual groomer for the Silver Ski Company: He grooms snow on bare spots and bad places for skiers. His snappish temper has already cost him five jobs, and this one too is on the line. But Sam has been having blackouts at the very times the Trickster is butchering victims and stuffing hearts up anuses, as well as penises into mouths, when, that is, not tearing folks limb from limb. The Trickster can take human form or the shapes of beasts, but is at heart a fiend made of mud, ice, and stone that eats human flesh. He is, of course, an evil figure from the racial unconscious of both whites and Indians, but he is especially intent on Sam, who denies the Trickster's existence and his own role in fighting him. Without fail, though, police work leads to Sam, who must face his destiny in the Great Corkscrew Tunnel. Marvelously strong on dialogue, Indian lore, and detail of any kind, Gray seems born with muscles and handles herself like a Tyson eager to k.o. King and Koontz. May she instead avoid the bear trap clichÇs of genre fiction and go mainstream.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47786-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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