A well-plotted vampire novel with an unusually self-aware protagonist.
Ancient undead, dark prophecies and the Catholic Church collide in Leone’s taut thriller, the first in a planned series.
After a brief prologue set in the ancient British Isles, long before the Normans or the Saxons laid claim to the land, the story opens in present-day London, with American Lucy Manning and her friend, Chrissy, enjoying the club scene. That is, until a handsome club-goer turns out to be a vampire and attacks them. Lucy barely survives; Chrissy disappears (and later turns up as a vampire herself). A priest and a nun approach Lucy in the hospital, who later reveal that they’re part of a squad—approved, but not officially chartered, by the Vatican—dedicated to killing vampires and other supernatural nuisances. Lucy accepts their invitation to join them, and begins a tough, whirlwind training regimen, made bearable by her budding romance with another vampire hunter. However, there are signs that the vampire population—and its supernatural threat to the entire world—is growing. Leone’s tight narrative expends little effort on subplots not directly connected to the main story. Although its basic storyline has been explored before—Leone explicitly acknowledges in the introduction his debt to John Steakley’s 2008 novel Vampire$—the novel’s character development gives it a refreshing depth and thoughtfulness. Lucy, a levelheaded but individualistic protagonist, chafes at restrictions and her trainer’s taunts, but realistically judges her own fitness and puts her emotions aside to focus on what needs to be done. None of the other characters have any illusions about their life expectancies—and the bloody climax of the book, a protracted battle in an abandoned tunnel complex, makes clear their fatalism is warranted—but they share a hope and belief that what they do makes the world better.
A well-plotted vampire novel with an unusually self-aware protagonist.Pub Date: March 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482739824
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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