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
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
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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