A quietly creepy horror debut about the calamities brought to a stodgy English public school by a rebellious student and his adoring chum. Jonathan Palmer just wants to fit in with the other 14-year-old boys at the elite Kirkston Abbey boarding school. Smart, conscientious and respectful to tyrannical teachers, he remains ashamed of his provincial Yorkshire accent and common middle- class origins. Though he has friends—like the odd twin brothers Michael and Stephen Perriman, and stalwart Nicholas Scott—Palmer is intrigued by his handsome, Byronic classmate Richard Rokeby. Rokeby, the dashing scion of a well-to-do family, doesn’t study, mocks his teachers, effortlessly passes exams, and doesn’t seem to want anyone’s friendship. When Rokeby inexplicably helps Palmer with his Latin and then defends him from the sadistic bullying of snobby James Wheatley, the two become buddies, sharing a brief vacation at the Rokeby estate, where Palmer learns that his friend is estranged from his father, who remarried after Rokeby’s mother died. The boys start playing with an old Ouija board that Rokeby found among a distant relative’s belongings, and Palmer begins to have nightmares that prove eerily prescient. Back at school, Rokeby vows to punish those who have tried to hurt Palmer. Of the oafs who bullied him, one suffers a crippling injury on the athletic field, another is taken out of school, and James Wheatley slips into paranoid delusions that lead to a supposedly accidental death. Afraid that Rokeby is evil incarnate, Nicholas Scott and kindly history teacher Alex Stewart try to intervene; then Stewart and others on the staff find themselves afflicted by unseen blackmailers while seemingly incidental misfortunes culminate in more deaths. An unusually gripping, character-driven tale with low-key violence that’s even scarier than the gore-on-the-floor more common to the genre. ($150,000 ad/promo)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6552-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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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