Showcase horror anthology: 22 original tales by Stephen King, Charles Grant, Ed Gorman, Richard Christian Matheson, and lesser lights, presented by the Horror Writers' Association. No piece by Bloch himself, alas, and no preface to explain how the book came about, although it apparently honors the famed penman and smiling motherstuffer of Psycho himself, this perhaps being Bloch's last chip, or—as the bouncy, irrepressibly loopy Master himself might pun—his last time around the Bloch. (Indeed, it was Bloch who, at 77, wrote in his unauthorized autobiography: ``Why anyone would want to be known as the author of Psycho is beyond me.'') King leads off the sheaf with a tour de force, ``Autopsy Room,'' a first-person tale about a golfer in a body bag who died on the course and is wheeled into the medical examiner's for an autopsy. Grant's ``Haunted'' tells of a knife-wielding killer who haunts a park and steals victims' faces. In Gorman's ``Out There in the Darkness,'' four middle-aged poker players kill a burglar whose escaped buddy then begins killing them. Matheson's first-person ``Please Help Me'' is truly scary: Three robbers of a 24-hour market take a hostage, bind and gag him, throw him into their trunk, and drive off. His fate would satisfy Edgar Allan Poe—dig? Dipped in deep purple, Denise M. Bruchman's ``The Lesser of Two Evils'' shows what happens when a mass murderer of prostitutes goes to a gypsy witch to have the ghost of Jack the Ripper extracted from his body; little does he know that the gypsy collects the blood of mass murderers, including that of the top one of this century. Jane Yolen's ``A Southern Night'' puts a new twist on the Susan Smith murders of her children. Nice stuff, but not a story rises above narrative and strives to be as stylish and memorable as Lovecraft, Poppy Z. Brite, or like masters of a fearful eloquence.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-881475-26-3
Page Count: 341
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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