A rare horror novel from the prolific and popular fantasist—and one that is really an adult fantasy at heart, gaudily celebrating the magic and terror of lust and love. The monster here—the "firefly"—snares its victims through effusions of pheromones, then sucks up their flesh, leaving only skin and bones. More eerie than fearsome, Anthony brings it on stage—wisely—only deep into the novella: a Fright Night knockoff of a sea-born blob. Far more interesting are its human foes, charming misfits who are Anthony's real focus. Foremost are "Geode" Demerit, caretaker of the Florida estate on which the first victim is found, and "Oenone" Brown, a poor local housewife whose son, then husband, are consumed by the firefly—forcing her to take refuge in the estate's mansion. Intoxicated by the perfumes of the foraging firefly, Geode and Oenone fall in love, Geode losing his impotency and Oenone her mousiness. Parallel to their love story runs that of Frank Tishner, a local cop, and May Flowers, trouble-shooter for the absent owner of the estate. As these two conspire to destroy the firefly, they also fall in love. Yet both love stories are only flames for the novel's real canvas, a panel of tales that Oenone tells—ranging from a bittersweet fable about a raped princess to a truly shocking story of a sexually abused five-year, old seductress: Oenone herself as a child. And within the cracks between these story-bricks, the firefly hovers, killing relentlessly until it kills one of the lovers—leading to the insect's death: but what about those baby fireflies? In an afterword, Anthony calls this "a special novel. . .of more consequence than my fantasy." Fair enough—though the copious, almost pornographic, sex nearly overwhelms his inventive storytelling, rich with surprising characters and Chinese puzzle-box plotting.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1990
ISBN: 0380759500
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990
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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