Though hard-boiled horror-writer Laymon has enjoyed a brisk career in mass-market and the occasional hardcover (The Stake, 1991, etc.), this stomach-churning mix of cannibalism and sexual sadism is Laymon at his pornoviolent worst—without the irony or manic glee that lifts most of his work above pulp. What's also here in spades, though, is Laymon's express-speed writing, an onslaught of declarative sentences and single-sentence paragraphs that whips the story along. The narrative opens on a note of sexual menace, as pretty D'Arcy Raines, a tour-guide at Mordock's Caverns, notices creepy 15-year-old Kyle Mordock ``staring at her rump'' during a tour. Moments later, the power shuts off, plunging the 40 people on the tour into pitch blackness 150 feet below the earth. A grim above-ground flashback reveals that the blackout was caused by a fire set by an enraged man who believed that Caverns' owner Ethan Mordock had killed his daughter. Other flashbacks, more vicious still, show that Ethan has indeed for years been snatching, raping, and torturing women, and that he has just introduced Kyle to the practice—but that he doesn't kill his victims. Instead, he drops them down a chute into a closed-off section of the Caverns, where most are eaten by previous victims but a few survive to go mad in the dark. When D'Arcy and her charges try to escape by breaking into this section, a bloodbath ensues, with the cannibals munching and crunching and the tourists gouging and biting back, as Kyle ogles D'Arcy and schemes. Will D'Arcy survive long enough to be saved by her sexy mom and her mom's new boyfriend, who even now are spelunking to the rescue? Maybe, but even Laymon's juggernaut prose can't redeem this off-putting exercise in depravity, which is as sordid as they come.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08845-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed...
McEwan’s latest, both powerful and equisite, considers the making of a writer, the dangers and rewards of imagination, and the juncture between innocence and awareness, all set against the late afternoon of an England soon to disappear.
In the first, longest, and most compelling of four parts, McEwan (the Booker-winning Amsterdam, 1998) captures the inner lives of three characters in a moment in 1935: upper-class 13-year-old Briony Tallis; her 18-year-old sister, Cecilia; and Robbie Turner, son of the family’s charlady, whose Cambridge education has been subsidized by their father. Briony is a penetrating look at the nascent artist, vain and inspired, her imagination seizing on everything that comes her way to create stories, numinous but still childish. She witnesses an angry, erotic encounter between her sister and Robbie, sees an improper note, and later finds them hungrily coupling; misunderstanding all of it, when a visiting cousin is sexually assaulted, Briony falsely brings blame to bear on Robbie, setting the course for all their lives. A few years later, we see a wounded and feverish Robbie stumbling across the French countryside in retreat with the rest of the British forces at Dunkirk, while in London Briony and Cecilia, long estranged, have joined the regiment of nurses who treat broken men back from war. At 18, Briony understands and regrets her crime: it is the touchstone event of her life, and she yearns for atonement. Seeking out Cecilia, she inconclusively confronts her and a war-scarred Robbie. In an epilogue, we meet Briony a final time as a 77-year-old novelist facing oblivion, whose confessions reframe everything we’ve read.
With a sweeping bow to Virginia Woolf, McEwan combines insight, penetrating historical understanding, and sure-handed storytelling despite a conclusion that borrows from early postmodern narrative trickery. Masterful.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50395-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.
A supposedly recovering alcoholic real estate agent tells her not-exactly-trustworthy version of life in her small New England town in this tragicomic novel by Leary (Outtakes from a Marriage, 2008, etc.).
Sixty-year-old Hildy Good, a divorced realtor who has lived all her life in Wendover on the Massachusetts North Shore, proudly points to having an ancestor burned at the stake at the Salem witch trials. In fact, her party trick is to do psychic readings using subtle suggestions and observational skills honed by selling homes. At first, the novel seems to center on Hildy’s insights about her Wendover neighbors, particularly her recent client Rebecca McAllister, a high-strung young woman who has moved into a local mansion with her businessman husband and two adopted sons. Hildy witnesses Rebecca having trouble fitting in with other mothers, visiting the local psychiatrist Peter Newbold, who rents an office above Hildy’s, and winning a local horse show on her expensive new mount. Hildy is acerbically funny and insightful about her neighbors; many, like her, are from old families whose wealth has evaporated. She becomes Rebecca’s confidante about the affair Rebecca is having with Peter, whom Hildy helped baby-sit when he was a lonely child. She helps another family who needs to sell their house to afford schooling for their special needs child. She begins an affair with local handyman Frankie Getchell, with whom she had a torrid romance as a teenager. But Hildy, who has recently spent a stint in rehab and joined AA after an intervention by her grown daughters, is not quite the jolly eccentric she appears. There are those glasses of wine she drinks alone at night, those morning headaches and memory lapses that are increasing in frequency. As both Rebecca’s and Hildy’s lives spin out of control, the tone darkens until it approaches tragedy. Throughout, Hildy is original, irresistibly likable and thoroughly untrustworthy.
Despite getting a little preachy toward the end, Leary has largely achieved a genuinely funny novel about alcoholism.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01554-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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