The sequel to last year’s The Driftless Zone carries on in the same neo-noir vein, as Harsch mixes old villains and flawed heroes with new in a tale of a city so corrupt that the only homes for the good guys are places most people would think of as uninhabitable. Take Gerard, for example: He lives quietly in the maintenance closet of a La Crosse, Wisconsin, office building, where he practices his viola after hours—until a foray into a nearby bar exposes him to the crooked cop whose wife he’s known too well. He flees with his barmate, Lola, who—d been giving the cop special oral treats after he framed her in a coke deal, to the surveillance van of Billy VeritÇ, feckless private eye and the ugliest man around—who’s also not one of the cops— favorite people. Billy stows Lola away while Gerard makes plans, but the plot thickens when an evil genius, Skunk, with an infallible eye for diagnosing the medical conditions of others, arrives to take over a motorcycle gang running the city’s drugs. Discovering that his office has been bugged by Billy, and that Gerard saw him abducting an FBI agent who then vanished, Skunk wants them both. But Gerard has taken his friends to an uninhabited island in the Mississippi for safety, leaving them with supplies and a promise to return weekly. Gerard’s good deeds, which include kidnaping the cop’s crooked partner, prove no match for Skunk’s powers, and when he fails to make the rendezvous with Billy and Lola, Billy knows they must prepare for the worst. The showdown comes as a tribute to Billy’s ingenuity and as a revelation to all. But Skunk is still the man in charge. Thanks to Harsch’s sophisticated style, the smoky flavor of noir and its parodic doppelgÑnger strike an apt balance here: the result is impressive, as complex and redolent as fine old wine.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1998
ISBN: 1-883642-92-2
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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