Echoes of James Fuerst’s Huge (2009) and the 2005 film Brick abound, but deft comic timing and a caustic, ambitious...
High-school student with dreams of collegiate glory investigates the murder of a classmate.
Debut novelist Munson combines a classic sense of adolescent alienation and a keen comedic voice to depict a bleakly funny teenage wasteland in the wilds of the District of Columbia. The book is structured around the college essay question of one Addison Schacht, a smart 18-year-old high-school senior who supplements the dreary monotony of life in an upper-middle-class D.C. suburb with a sideline selling marijuana to his equally well-off classmates. But Addison fully intends to surpass his peers with a meteoric rise to academic greatness—as a classics major, no less. His only real comrade in his delusional struggle is best friend and soul mate Phoebe “Digger” Zeleny, a funny, sly young woman Addison repeatedly declares is not his girlfriend by any stretch of the imagination. The crime to which our hero devotes himself is the startling death of his classmate Kevin Broadus, gunned down in a coffee shop near the Potomac. Two others were also killed, but the murderer took the time to pump a dozen bullets into Kevin. “You had to figure all the extra bullets…meant something,” Addison says.
Echoes of James Fuerst’s Huge (2009) and the 2005 film Brick abound, but deft comic timing and a caustic, ambitious protagonist make this a perfectly valid entry in the teen noir subgenre.Pub Date: April 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53227-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.
Better known as the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker in his day job as general manager of London’s Lyceum Theatre is the focus of Irish writer O’Connor’s atmospheric new novel.
Mind you, there are plenty of nods to his famous horror story, from a ghost in the theater’s attic named Mina to a scene-painter named Jonathan Harker, plus the fact that the dreaded vampire bears a more than passing resemblance to Stoker’s mercurial boss, legendary actor Henry Irving. Harker turns out to be a woman, a twist that suits the seething homoerotic currents between Stoker and Irving, who can also be found entwined in the naked arms of co-star Ellen Terry. Terry’s voice as recorded in 1906—funny, bitchy, extremely shrewd about her acting partner’s gifts and limitations—offers a welcome counterpoint to the sometimes overly dense third-person narrative of Stoker’s tenure at the Lyceum and on tour in the late 1870s and '80s, grappling with Irving’s neuroses while striving to snatch some time for his own writing. This is a tougher, colder work than Ghost Light (2011), O’Connor’s previous fictional excursion into theatrical lives, and that novel’s portrait of actor Molly Allgood’s love affair with playwright John Synge was gentler than this one of Stoker’s thorny relationship with Irving, a toxic blend of need, rage, resentment, and profound love. Still, the men’s bond is as moving and more unsettling, proof that, as Stoker later tells Harker, “Love is not a matter of who puts what where but of wanting only goodness and respectful kindliness for the loved one.” Irving seems less deserving of such kindness than Stoker’s assertive wife, Flo, who makes sure he gets copyright protection for the vampire story his boss cruelly dismisses as “filth and tedious rubbish from first to last.” Flo’s tender letter to Terry after Stoker’s death closes the novel, with another affirmation that “There are many kinds of love. I know that. He did, too.”
An uneven mix of Dracula and theater lore but a thoughtful exploration of the tangled nature of desire and commitment.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-593-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In 1939, a six-year-old boy is sent-by his anti-Nazi parents to a remote village in Poland where they believe he will be safe. Things happen, however, and the boy is left to roam the Polish countryside, trying to stay alive, looking for food, shelter, and a principle of Justice to accomodate what he Sees people do to each other and to him. To the blond, blue-eyed peasants in his part of the country, the swarthy, darkeyed boy who speaks the dialect of the educated class is either Jew, gypsy, vampire, or devil. They fear him and they fear what the Germans will do to them if he is found among them, So he must keep moving. In doing so over a period of years, he observes every Conceivable variation on the theme of horror, sadism, and bestiatity. A cockold miller gouges out the eyes of a ploughboy with the back of a spoon. He loses his voice in a pile of human excrement, almost freezes to death underneath-a frozen lake, and is 'hung by his Wrists atop a vicious dog. The boy learns Communism and the principle of revenge from two kindly Russian officers and reluctantly re-joins his parents. Kosinski appears now in the narrative voice with a tract on evil, the culpability of the peasants, the advantages of personal struggle in the country as opposed to anonymous annihilation in the city. The novel proper, without tidying-up, is purely and simply a panoply of horror, expertly wrought and disgusting. There is no more parable or symbolism here than there was at Buchenwald. Jerzy is a brilliant writer, but let the reader beware. It's very hard to take.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1965
ISBN: 080213422X
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
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