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
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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