Though best known for his occult horror (Midnight Sun, 1990, etc.), Campbell built his career on psychothrillers barely tinged with the uncanny (The Doll Who Ate His Mother, 1976, etc.). Here's a new one, about an antic serial killer, intriguing for its unusual blend of horror and farce but lacking much punch. Jack Orchard, owner of a suburban Liverpool video-store, believes wholeheartedly in luck—which he's fresh out of: As the story opens, a series of pratfalls causes his shop to burn down; he's denied a bank loan; and he learns that his shop was uninsured. But then a chain letter arrives, promising to ``turn ill luck into good'' if Jack mails it to 13 others, which he does. And it seems as if his luck is changing—until a hoped-for job falls through and his daughter is attacked by thugs. To Jack's increasingly addled, numerology-clogged mind, this can mean only that some recipients of his letter failed to mail it on in turn, with misfortune rebounding on ``whoever's most accident-prone''—i.e., Jack. What to do? Why, confront the culprits and—for reasons Campbell never quite makes clear—begin to kill them off with a blowtorch. The first murder does seem to improve Jack's fortune—he lands a job—but when his wife loses hers, it's time for several more deaths, most depicted in gruesome slapstick (``a convulsion of his whole body sent Foster jackknifing backward several feet. `Murder,' he shrieked, `murgle, murglub,' and sank''), until Jack becomes known as the ``Mersey Burner''—and then slips off to Greece, where he ends his spree. There's no doubt a gleam in Campbell's eye as he confounds thriller conventions—no cop-vs.-killer here, and little suspense- -and lays on the wryness, but, despite lively language and character-shading, Jack's evolution into a killer doesn't wash, the murders become repetitive, and the ending lies flat on the page. Back to the occult, Mr. Campbell, please.
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-85350-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
