Knockout first novel by ``the combined talents of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a criminal psychologist''—a psychothriller already optioned for film. George Gray, an ex-reporter, has found a new use for investigative journalism. He locates big-money bad guys in real estate or other endeavors, gets the goods on them, then threatens them with exposure in print and with jail terms unless they make full restitution on their misdeeds—and also give him a juicy cut. (``That's the payback. Blackmail. You end up calling the shots, telling them what to do and making them pay you. They hate it more than any jail.'') Gray thinks that this act makes reporting seem impotent: where the reporter drops his ink bomb and then sits back to watch, Gray follows through and himself runs criminals through the wringer—and he's done this many times. But this time out he's nearly torn to ribbons by attack dogs and by a psychotic second-in- command, Reidus, who enjoys inspired modes of inflicting pain, often letting his victims live to experience their pain to the full. At one point Reidus even breaks Gray's leg like balsa wood. He also appears as unkillable as Frankenstein's monster and rises incredibly from the dead to go on with his horrors. He works for master swindler Carlton, who is emptying a Philadelphia suburb of its blue-collar inhabitants, one by one, and buying up their property on a grand scale, supposedly to build a mall and a spanking new community (he's really just after investors' money). Gray falls in with Sara Mitchell, daughter of Carlton's former partner whom Carlton drove to suicide. Sara herself has become a supertrained killing machine—but is she a match for Reidus? Rich in every way, about detection, newspapering, real estate, with sly echoes of The Maltese Falcon.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72328-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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