The story delivers on demons, vampires and bloody mayhem, but skimps on finer, animating nuances.
Vampires anxiously wait for the awakening of their queen; when she arrives, all hell breaks loose.
Jessup’s debut horror novel overflows with blood and gore, and quite a few intriguing characters. Satan plots to unleash vicious, demonic vampires on the world and install a queen to rule them all. It starts with Artimus, who promises his soul to Satan for wealth and power, but after death, he must return to Earth as a creature of the night. He soon finds his survival depends on feasting on humans and building a discipleship for Satan and the future queen. Artimus rapes a young maiden and impregnates her with his demon seed; it’s through this woman’s descendants that the queen will emerge. Artimus also taps Baltazar to be his chief disciple, since Baltazar displayed natural demonic qualities as a human. When Baltazar must take over as leader, he, in turn, creates two other savage beasts as his cohorts. They prepare for their queen, and her reign, but they must wait for more than 100 years for her to appear. In the meantime, the vampires prey and feast on the innocent. When Lilly—the awaited vampire queen—arrives, she’s not only unaware of her destiny, it turns out she has a will of her own. It’s a good setup, but too much goes unexplored; character motivation is anemic, for example. Lilly’s story holds potent drama, even before she awakens, but the novel doesn’t supply her backstory. Without it, we don’t understand why she differs so greatly from her kind. The novel delivers some terrific scenes (one involves a particularly vicious vampire who spares a victim), but just as often information is explained rather than dramatized. This novel is not for the faint of heart or children, as Jessup does not shy away from spilled guts or sex. It also needs careful editing and proofing.
The story delivers on demons, vampires and bloody mayhem, but skimps on finer, animating nuances.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: June 6, 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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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