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QUAKE

A big one on the Richter scale, but not the big one expected along the San Andreas Fault, hits Los Angeles and definitely strips Angelenos of their morals. At the start, the quake allows sex-hungry psychopath Stanley Banks to kill his wheelchair-bound mother by smashing a piece of ceiling plaster over her head. Stanley is the novel's chief villain, but as the tale unwinds, many equally disgusting people are loosed into the reader's mind, each a little worse than the other. Nasty people caught up in stomach-churning pornoviolence, though, are a Laymon specialty (Savage, 1994, etc.). Here, Stanley leches for his sexy neighbor, Sheila Banner, and when the earth quakes at 8:20 a.m. or so, naked Sheila jumps into her bathtub for safety, where Stanley soon finds her, unhurt but pinned by beams. While readying Sheila for ``rescue,'' he rapes their neighbor Judy Wellman, then kills another neighbor bent on helping Sheila. Meanwhile, Sheila's husband, Clint, tries to get home from his office and back to his family, but instead gets mixed up with Mary Davis, who has a car that runs, and with spunky but weird 13-year- old Emerald O'Hara, who is parted from her family. Also trying to get crosstown through collapsed buildings, fires, sheared-off hydrants, and wrecked cars are Clint's daughter Barbara, a teacher, her student Heather, and her boyfriend Pete. Sudden death lurks everywhere as looters rape and rampage and kill each other for cars and bikes. Laymon's insistent eroticism on nearly every page—after granting himself an earthquake to work with, accidental death and destruction left and right, not to mention a blood-bedewed killer pussycat and grisly maniacs skinning people alive—well, his endless torn blouses, breast-peepery, and slather of liplicking lusts are wildly out of place. A poor disaster epic whose vulturous vulgarity cramps all possible scope.

Pub Date: May 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-312-13150-X

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995

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NINTH HOUSE

With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...

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Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.

Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.

With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

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A BLIGHT OF BLACKWINGS

A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.

Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.

In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.

A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019

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