Fresh-baked evil in sinful slices, some thick and hearty, others thin and wispy.
Plenty of reaffirmation for all the freaks and geeks sulking in the back of the classroom.
Given the plethora of anthologies in the fantasy and horror field, it’s nice that editors Holder and Kilpatrick have at least compiled theirs around the easily identifiable theme of loners, introverts and outcasts: “scarred human beings … spiritually twisted,” as they put it. (Unlike all those well-adjusted people just like everyone else in most fantasy stories.) The couple of marquee names here don’t necessarily offer the book’s best material. Neil Gaiman’s short, ghostly poem doesn’t resonate much, though it helps set the tone nicely, while Tanith Lee materializes with a selection from the next volume of her Scarabae series: the usual over-the-top adolescent vampire goofiness. Many of the scenarios are chilling but familiar variations on horror fiction tropes: DVD players that do unearthly things, men who enact nasty vengeance on their loved ones after listening to the shadows outside the house. More interesting are pieces like John Shirley’s “Miss Singularity,” in which a teenaged girl whose father just happens to be a physicist—lucky for genre writers that their characters have such easy access to experimental technologies—accidentally projects her suicidal worldview onto everyone else in the neighborhood via a device that he’s developing. Even better is Poppy Z. Brite’s “The Working Slob’s Prayer,” which contains not a single festering corpse or otherworldly evil. Instead, Brite situates her outsider world in a New Orleans restaurant run by an Anthony Bourdain–like chef who presides over the late-hours staff bacchanal: “lines of cocaine laid out on the long copper bar, boxes of nitrous oxide chargers that whipped cooks’ brains instead of cream.” It’s a potent slice-of-kitchen-life that will ring true to food professionals, outsiders all.
Fresh-baked evil in sinful slices, some thick and hearty, others thin and wispy.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-451-46044-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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