Bloodfest first novel written by acid-crazed vampires cooling off on marijuana. Brite's novel also kicks off the Abyss horror line, which is not likely to find as strong a follow-up for many moons to come. This is not for everyone, even hardened horror lovers. It creates its own genre, taking sadistic, bisexual splatterpunk to places it has never been. Steve and Ghost, a psychic two-man band known as Lost Souls?, are lying around drunk on White Horse scotch: ``Behind them the river passed in silence; the lowest-hanging branches brushed the water, and the eaves rotted on the bough. The moon spread like butter on the black river....'' They live together at the dead end of Burnt Church Road in Missing Mile, Louisiana, not far from New Orleans, where vampires roam during the throes of Mardi Gras. The story's plot is none too clear, but it involves 16- year-old Jess: Raped first by her father, she seduces Christian, a vampire bar-owner, then dies giving birth to Nothing, a vampire orphan left to be brought up by alcoholic Father and Mother. Nothing, now a bisexual teenager hooked on a Lost Souls? tape, decides to leave home and visit his idolized band at Missing Mile. Meanwhile, a trio of the rattiest white-trash vampires ever seen in fiction—Molochai, Twig, and Zillah—burn up the countryside in a van, draining hitchhikers and filling up whiskey bottles with blood. Christian too goes on the road, looking for Molochai, Twig, and Zillah, who are different types of vampire from him—meanwhile, there are the Raventon twins, a third kind of vampire. These folks bathe in blood and sperm and alcohol, and clearly Lost Souls? is not about to wipe out three strains of vampires—though they try. Brite tosses out any idea of good taste and remakes the language of horror with a bloodlust that reduces all competitors to dust.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-30875-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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