Spank you very much, Ramsey.
Reprint of Campbell’s 1987 Scared Stiff: Tales of Seduction and Terror (1987) that keeps the Clive Barker introduction and has three new stories and an afterword by Campbell (Pact of the Fathers, 2001, etc.). The original illustrations are gone.
With plenty of meat about his start as a writer, Campbell’s afterword gives the background about the seven earlier stories here—which, back in the late ’60s and ’70s, were meant to be groundbreaking works in the horror genre. Among them, “The Doll” tells of a coven that meets for orgies and for placing curses on a devil doll that attracts the devil himself into the orgy, a huge figure with curling horns and a monstrous penis. So the curses work—but is this really the devil? Campbell’s urge for variety has him feature different pervy modes in each of the new tales as well. In the rather dreary and fogbound “The Limits of Fantasy,” a dirty-picture photographer for a men’s spanker magazine sneaks pictures through the frosted glass of her bathroom window of a beautiful blond neighbor and then finds that his spanky fantasies about the pictures have painful real-life effects. No power of fantasy can force glowing interest into that sow’s ear from Monogram Pictures. In “The Body in the Window,” a British councilman tours the Amsterdam red-light district and sex shops, looking for the worst he can find, to report to the council, and to his wife, to justify his trip. This turns out to be a bony girl his daughter’s age, manacled naked to a wheel. When he tries to free her with pliers, she seduces him on the turning wheel and he finds that—well, a surprise. The most charming of Campbell’s cryptic kisses is “Kill Me Hideously,” about horrorwriter Willy Bantam. He’s begged repeatedly by a nutcase—who loves his goriest books—to put her in his next book. So he does—but she’s a terrible mess before he’s through.
Spank you very much, Ramsey.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30004-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
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
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