Often horrific, relentlessly stark, and truly unforgettable.
Day (Necrosaurus Rex, 2014) offers 11 dark tales teeming with monstrous beings.
It’s fitting that so many characters in this horror short story collection are surrounded by death. William, the groundskeeper for the Reed family in “The Ghosts in Winter’s Wake,” for example, had a sister who was murdered, and both his mother and Philip, the youngest Reed child, died in the snow. The latter loss conjures up somber memories, which may be causing William to hear voices. Similar tragedies befall the main characters of “Snow Like Lonely Ghosts…” and the genuinely unsettling “Bright Red Mess,” both of whom have lost their mothers. These tales both delve into the shadowy side of humanity; some characters are unhinged while others are sane but simply evil. Vile creatures abound in other stories: some friends soon regret swimming in the vicinity of a rumored Volkswagen-sized turtle in “Chomp Chomp,” and there may be validity to the warning from Tim’s grandfather about a witch in “Spoiling.” Day showcases his versatility in the last two tales: “Beast Mode” abandons chills in favor of action, as vengeance-seeking bikers make the mistake of attacking a werewolf on his wedding day. It’s a visceral piece, rife with blood, biting, and bullets, this time making the monster the protagonist (complete with a romance) and the purely human characters far more ghastly. In the closer, “GG Allin and the Final Flight of the Chrysanthemum Byzantium,” the late, infamous real-life rocker of the title gets a pass out of hell and the gift of immortality. It’s a gleefully odd sci-fi/fantasy hybrid, and exactly how GG stays immortal is best left unspoiled. Prefacing each story are Spooner’s (Dead Men, 2015, etc.) stunning black-and-white illustrations, which look as if they’ve been scratched onto the pages. They accentuate the already haunting descriptions, such as this passage from “Snow Like Lonely Ghosts…”: “Snow falls thick, like meat, and covers damn near everything but the persistence of man….The cold outside is patient, aches bones, like the pain of being lonely.”
Often horrific, relentlessly stark, and truly unforgettable.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945373-89-3
Page Count: 138
Publisher: JournalStone
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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