Perhaps Campbell's most inspired suspense novel yet, rivaling Midnight Sun (1990), though purged of horror and the supernatural. Violence is on the rise in Manchester, especially among the young, as the warm, well-spoken Travis family finds when it moves to England from Florida. Even back home, 12-year-old Marshall was bullied and beaten, a nightmare that follows him to Manchester, where his mother, Suzanne, teaches a university course in violence and the cinema. Meantime, Marshall's bookseller dad, Don, is attacked in his car and threatened with a gun by the psychotic Phil Fancy, who escapes. When local newspapers print an unflattering drawing of him, Phil spitefully attacks young Marshall, sprains his ankle when turning on Don and, unable to flee, is arrested. He's given a jail sentence, which is bad news for the Travises, since the Fancy clan, all mad and bad, vow revenge. Then constables raid the Travis home and confiscate their entire US movie collection, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Singin' in the Rain: Films in Britain must be nipped of violence and bear the censors' seal. When two Fancys stomp Don to death, they receive sentences of five years for manslaughter rather than longer sentences for murder: Don had a gun, illegal in Britain. Then Phil's vengeful son Darren abducts Marshall and keeps him prisoner in the Fancy house, planning his death as Suzanne and the police begin searching for the lost boy. What raises the story above rather routine suspense is the poisonously befogged, rapacious Fancy family, its members infected with a smiling brainrot that the reader must experience to believe. To live page after page in the Fancy homestead is to know that you don't have to leave England to find the heart of darkness. A triumph of deadpan (but riotously twisted) dialogue and bizarre characters in a novel that would be hailed as savage satire were it not gussied up as suspense. Deserves daring celluloid.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-86035-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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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