Penzler has assembled what ought to be the last word in vampire-ish verbiage. Yet, given that there’s money to be made in...
“Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” Thus Sherlock Holmes, a rare grown-up voice to counter an infantilized world of werewolves, monsters, zombies and vampires.
To scan today’s bookstore shelves is to see that the last category of fictional beings is a hot ticket. It raises a contrarian question as well: In a nation where most adults believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, might they not also believe that vampire books count as nonfiction? Maybe. But the 6,000-year-old-Earth types aren’t likely to be big readers to begin with. Not so the vampire-lit crowd, huge, growing and not content to sink its teeth into a single volume, as witness the success of Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. There are better books in the genre, notably Dacre Stoker’s new Dracula the Un-Dead. Yet, if zombie buffs have long had a better inventory from which to draw—Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and World War Z can do wonders of a listless evening, after all—vampires clearly win the argument, if only in sheer literary bulk. Witness, as evidence, Otto Penzler’s new anthology The Vampire Archives (Vintage; $25.00; October; ISBN 978-0-307-47389-9), which weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. So big is the book that, if carefully positioned atop one, it would keep all but the sturdiest of the undead from opening a coffin lid from inside, which, come to think of it, might make a nice premise for a sequel to the film Vampire’s Kiss. Penzler, chief mysterian at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and a well-practiced anthologist, is clearly of the more-is-better school, and he turns up little gems of vampirosity from all sorts of writers. Among the better known of them are Arthur Conan Doyle (of aforementioned Sherlock Holmes fame) and the always satisfying M.R. James, who had very specific rules for spinning out a supernatural tale (no sex, lots of malevolence), as well as Edgar Poe, Ambrose Bierce, D.H. Lawrence (who would have known that Lawrence ever wrote a vampire story?), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (ditto) and Guy de Maupassant (ditto ditto). Then there are legions of tale-spinners from the dime-store magazines of yore, perhaps best represented by Ray Bradbury, who closes a little vampire tale, as is his custom, on a note of delicious irony. (Beware the innocent kid, bloodsucker. Always beware the kid.) Stephen King gets a say, natch, and he does it with spine-tingling efficiency and sanguinary spurts. There are those who grew up outside the pulp tradition, too, such as Anne Rice and Clive Barker, who spin fine tales of their own. Only the very youngest writers seem to be missing, perhaps because there are so few suitably pulpy publications left for them to work in.
Penzler has assembled what ought to be the last word in vampire-ish verbiage. Yet, given that there’s money to be made in the puncture wounds, unreflective mirrors and pallid complexions of vampire lit, there will doubtless be many more such words to come. All we can do is hope for another fad to take its place, and soon. Killer robots? Flesh-stripping mosquitoes? Monster mutant MRSA? We’re on the edge of our seats.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-47389-9
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
