Pseudonymous Smith, now officially unmasked as Joyce Carol Oates, dips once more into the troubled pool of star-crossed twins in the most overwrought of her seven gothic pastiches (Double Delight, 1997, etc.). Men of a certain sort keep stopping to eye Starr Bright, and why not? She’s carefully made up, alluringly dressed, with a look that suggests that she may be a woman of a certain sort herself. A few of those men—traveling salesman Billy Ray Cobb, for example, or vacationing city official Ernie Fenke—even pick her up and take her to the out-of-the-way motels where she leaves them dead as stuck pigs, salting the scenes with false clues before picking her victims clean and vanishing into the night. Yet Starr Bright’s motive isn’t robbery but rage, as Oates hints from page one. When Starr Bright, nÇe Rose of Sharon Donner, goes to earth with her sister Lily Merrick in upstate New York, and Oates reveals that her murderous hatred of men stems from her ruinous high-school romance with vapid athlete Mack Dwyer (who’s remained conveniently close to home), the revelation doesn’t have any dramatic force, because the note of hysteria has been sustained almost without a break from the very beginning. By sketching in Rose and Lily’s background as fraternal twin daughters of a strict minister, showing the amateur theatricals they shared as children, and playing Sharon’s doomed sexual relationships off against her sister’s normal small-town success (kindly ex-Marine husband, budding teenaged daughter), Oates traces Sharon’s hysteria to layers of sexual, religious, and social oppression. But it’s all so familiar that the sociological diagnosis seems pat, the prose (“You have to do what I say! You have to! You’re my slave!”) thin and monotonously breathless, the set-pieces unnuanced and shrill, and the shuddery climax a pale echo of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? A mediocre vintage for the gifted and prolific Oates, or perhaps a sign that it’s time to move on to triplets or quads.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-525-94452-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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