In his intro, Stephen King bows to the Master for regenerating a stale genre. Indeed, The Shining bears touches of...
The Grand Master of Horror (the astral classic What Dreams May Come (1978), recently filmed with Robin Williams) offers 20 chillers from over the years.
The jacket copy says that the sheaf includes Matheson’s famed “Duel,” the basis for boy-wonder Stephen Spielberg’s notable 1971 first film (a paranoid tractor-trailer chases a mild-mannered traveling salesman across the desert)—but, alas, it’s not here. Even so, torrential paranoia rules throughout this shivery, if generally far-fetched, collection. Two classics stand out: the title piece (once adapted for The Twilight Zone), in which a passenger in a DC-7 sees a semihuman entity hopping about the wing in lightning flashes and tearing the cowling off a turboprop—though no one else can see the evil, grinning monster. In “Prey,” a woman hounded by her monstrously needy mother buys a Haitian voodoo doll for her anthropologist boyfriend, but then is chased about her apartment by the living horror. “Dress of White Silk” is a retarded child’s obsessive monologue about his (or her) late mother’s wedding gown—a fixation that leads to bloodshed. Far more amusing and successful is “Blood Son,” in which another retarded youth memorizes Bram Stoker’s Dracula, becomes obsessed with transforming himself into a vampire, steals a vampire bat from the zoo so it will drink his blood and maybe change him into—well, you know. “Through Channels” is told as a police tape-recording of a boy accused of, hmm, let’s just say four viscous victims are found watching television. The longest and high-spiritedly overwritten entry is “Slaughter House,” in which two brothers with a taste for the Victorian buy the abandoned Slaughter House beloved since their youth. In their restored, candlelit mansion, the two, caressed by ghostly hands, turn against each other while the ectoplasmal Clarissa Slaughter roams their rooms.
In his intro, Stephen King bows to the Master for regenerating a stale genre. Indeed, The Shining bears touches of “Slaughter House.”Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30411-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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