Clever, lightweight entertainment from the author of Fag Hag (1992—not reviewed): a broad farce about a Chicago account- executive at an ad agency populated by homophobes who lives through a series of embarrassing misadventures—before screaming out his sexual preference to the world. Lionel Frank is a nervous Nellie who pretends by day to be one of the macho boys but at night frequents dance bars and yearns for a male lover. Fortunately, he thinks, the art director at the agency is a lesbian, thereby directing homophobic attention away from him, but she also happens to frequent the same dance club he does, and sees him panting over a nude dancer's equipment. Lionel at one point gets thrown into jail when he's caught in the middle of a Slavic demonstration, where he meets Emil, a straight medical student he longs for. Mostly, though, he bounces around town either alone or in the company of neighbor and confidante Yolanda—until the whole group is sent packing for a weekend together at the Wild Rose, a resort in Wisconsin. Lionel has a wonderful night with David, the owner's son who is leaving the priesthood (Rodi, at the Wild Rose as elsewhere, takes all the easy potshots, especially at the men's movement). Meanwhile, Bob, Yolanda's on-again off-again lover, turns up at the resort with a spear and beats up Lionel before kidnapping him. Finally, though, having had enough of disguises and duplicity, Lionel rises from the lake like a fish and screams out: ``I'M GAY! I'M GAY! I'M GAY! I'M GAAAY!'' In an epilogue, we learn that he's a happy soul, so outfront he even announces to a Chicago cabbie that he's on his way to meet his male lover. Rodi's caricature of office politics is a hoot—but the comedy here is so one-sided and broad that it often misses its target.
Pub Date: May 6, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93606-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
Ten years in the workaday progress of a New York Mafia sort of family dynasty tale with all the attendant flurries of great houses at war. Don Corleone is ruler of the Family, avenger and dispenser of favors, from judges boughten verdicts to rub-outs among the fiefdoms. The noble Don ages and there is the nagging worry as to who shall carry on. Eldest son Sonny is too impetuous; Freddie is a fornicator; Michael fancies a teaching career with his Yankee bride. Along with the manipulative, diplomatic and skull-smashing demands of the Eastern empire of real estate, manufacturing, and gambling, there is always the threat of treachery from within one unfortunate example of which snuffs out Sonny by the Jones Beach toll booths. Michael, forgetting the scholar's life, pumps bullets in revenge, is sent to Italy, and is finally returned miraculously intact after assassination attempts. It is Michael, after the Don's near murder and eventual death from heart failure who reasserts the Family as Number One in a coup which includes the garrotting of a traitorous brother-in-law. The scene roams from coast to coast, provides glimpses of the sex/love tangles of the Ladies Auxiliary, family fun and cosy Italian fiestas, boppings, bashings, shootings, hackings. A Mafia Whiteoaks, bound for popularity, once you get past the author's barely concealed admiration for the "ethics" and postulates of primitive power plays.
Pub Date: March 10, 1969
ISBN: 0451205766
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1969
BOOK TO SCREEN
An improvement over The Dead Zone, with King returning to his most tried-and-true blueprint. As in The Shining, the psi-carrier is a child, an eight-year-old girl named Charlie; but instead of foresight or hindsight, Charlie has firestarting powers. She looks and a thing pops into flame—a teddy bear, a nasty man's shoes, or (by novel's end) steel walls, whole houses, and stables and crowds of government villains. Charlie's parents Vicky and Andy were once college guinea pigs for drug experiments by The Shop, a part of the supersecret Department of Scientific Intelligence, and were given a hyperpowerful hallucinogen which affected their chromosomes and left each with strange powers of mental transference and telekinesis. When Vicky and Andy married, their genes produced Charlie and her wild talent for pyrokinesis: even as a baby in her crib, Charlie would start fires when upset and, later on, once set her mother's hands on fire. So Andy is trying to teach Charlie how to keep her volatile emotions in check. But when one day he comes home to find Vicky gruesomely dead in the ironing-board-closet, murdered by The Shop (all the experimental guinea pigs are being eliminated), Andy goes into hiding with Charlie in Manhattan and the Vermont backwoods—and Charlie uses her powers to set the bad men on fire and blow up their cars. They're soon captured, however, by Rainbird, a one-eyed giant Indian with a melted face—and father and daughter, separated, spend months being tested in The Shop. Then Andy engineers their escape, but when Andy is shot by Rainbird, Charlie turns loose her atomic eyes on the big compound. . . . Dumb, very, and still a far cry from the excitement of The Shining or Salem's Lot—but King keeps the story moving with his lively fire-gimmick and fewer pages of cotton padding than in his recent, sluggish efforts. The built-in readership will not be disappointed.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 1980
ISBN: 0451167805
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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