A short, fast-paced love story cleverly concealed as a horror story.
With an intriguing twist, debut author Deyo takes the timeworn werewolf myth and turns it upside down, creating a new legend in the process.
In this tale of love triumphing over evil, Sally, a small-town girl, is making her way home on a snowy evening when she hears cries coming from a Dumpster. Inside she finds an abandoned puppy, barely alive. The puppy, which she names Max, soon becomes the center of her world. In a seedier part of town, a down-and-out prostitute named Nettie is ruminating on her miserable life when she sees a gorgeous woman appear before her. The woman promises Nettie that, for the small price of her soul, she can become attractive and rich beyond her dreams. Nettie agrees to the pact and awakens the following morning transmogrified, now stunningly beautiful. The story at first seems straightforward, but Deyo takes time to create a compelling background for his main players—Sally, who just wants to better her life, and Nettie, raised poor with no father and a heavy-drinking mother—and the supernatural twists that ensnare them. Yet they witness these fantastical events without the kind of shock and amazement readers might expect. The story moves along at a frantic pace, but Deyo manages to wrangle in the dueling narratives, as the next full moon rises and the cost of Nettie’s demonic deal is revealed: She morphs into a raging beast harboring an insatiable bloodlust. Soon, Max, now a grown dog, confronts the beast, protecting Sally but getting badly mauled in the fight. After being bitten by the werewolf, unsettling changes overtake Max: He transforms into a human male and can later change back and forth at will—a storyline that helps make this chronicle startlingly unique.
A short, fast-paced love story cleverly concealed as a horror story.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468167580
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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