One wishes for a slightly—ahem—tastier and less flabby gathering. But if zombies are your cup of meat, this is just the...
“They sat like people asleep with their eyes open, staring, but seeing nothing.” A Tea Party rally? No, no: A clutch of zombies, the stars of Penzler’s (The Vampire Archives, 2009, etc.) latest mega-anthology.
Zombies are the latest big thing, of course, at least in filmdom. But whereas the zombies of the movies now move quickly, eat all body parts indiscriminately and explode very nicely, the zombies of literature (pulp, mostly) are a slower and ever so slightly more stately bunch of ghouls. Consider Penzler’s starting point, a story from 1929 called “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields,” in which you’d have to look very hard to see that those unseeing, eyes-wide-open folks were truly the walking undead and not, in fact, merely suffering from a bad hangover after one too many mojitos. Many of Penzler’s selections are variations on a very limited theme: A traveler to some torrid country down Caribbean way finds, to his or her horror, that the locals are creepy-crawly types, “grayed to the hue of putrescent bone,” as writes one Arthur Leo Zagat—whether a forerunner of the restaurant guides, alas, we do not know, though the author of that starting-point tale did, Penzler delights in telling us, indulge in cannibalism. Some of Penzler’s choices are arguable: Sure, Guy De Maupassant’s story “Was It a Dream?” sports a mention of a poor schmo walking “with extended arms, knocking against the tombs,” but it’s a stretch, probably, to include it in the canon of zombie lit. Inarguably zombielicious, though, are Karen Haber’s latter-day tale “Red Angels,” with its sly good humor (“The best artist in Haiti is some sort of undead thing that just drools and paints”), Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s very strange short story “The Song the Zombie Sang,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s spooky (natch) confection “Herbert West—Reanimator.” On the down side, Penzler does not satisfactorily explain his criteria for inclusion, and there are a couple of iffy picks, including the endless “Z is for Zombie”; his introduction is glancing, and some fine recent tales (notably Max Brooks’ World War Z) go unnoticed.
One wishes for a slightly—ahem—tastier and less flabby gathering. But if zombies are your cup of meat, this is just the thing.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-74089-2
Page Count: 827
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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