An overcooked contemporary Gothic splatter-fest.
Jealousy is at the heart of this brutal horror story pulsing with axe-wielding gnomes and blood-spewing cats.
This carnival of sexual violence, obscenities and gore is offset by the love that binds a gallant group of teenage friends, two of whom are struggling with personal tragedy. Ethan is haunted with guilt over the murder of his kid brother, and Shay, the new beauty in town, is fleeing a tortured past. Imagine Shay’s horror when, on her first day at school, a strange boy blurts out her secret in public. In a nice creepy touch, when the boy is questioned, he has no memory of having said anything. In walks the school bully Viktor Sols, a lipless, pallid, dead-eyed psychopath. He sets eyes on Shay and desires her completely but then gets killed, and a weird savagery is unleashed. A powerful mind-hacker (a straight Harry Potter rip-off) makes the youngsters want to rape, masturbate and kill. The same sick force murders people on a blinding, videogame scale. Subtlety is not Shaw’s strong suit. When Shay is abducted, Ethan and company set out to rescue her. Nothing, however, prepares them for the twisting evil within the sinister bowels of Sols House. Shaw has a sharp ear for the trendy, hormonal banter of the schoolyard and the unspoken racist abuse that students have to battle (“ugly Chink bitch”). There are evocative flashes—the stone of the Sols family crypt is “the color of bones,” teeth patter to the floor like “enamel hailstones”—and an earnest if unoriginal flogging of the supernatural arsenal (howling storms, open graves, midnight knocks, the undead). Unfortunately, all this is submerged in a tedious torrent of overwriting—“two boys were wading through the gaze of every kid in the room like a disease advancing upon a nascent civilization”—and sub-climaxes that never seem to end.
An overcooked contemporary Gothic splatter-fest.Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0981599304
Page Count: 349
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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