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 best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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