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MR. SPLITFOOT

Name: MR. SPLITFOOT
Author: Samantha Hunt
ISBN: 978-0-544-52670-9

by Samantha Hunt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016

A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.

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Foster children, abandoned houses, and craters left by meteorites weave together a strange and frightening ghost story.

In Hunt’s surreal third novel (The Invention of Everything Else, 2008, etc.), 17-year-olds Nat and Ruth cleave to each other at The Love of Christ! Foster Home, Farm, and Mission in upstate New York. Nat’s “ability” to talk to the dead catches the attention of Mr. Bell, a con man, who convinces them to take their show on the road. A strange man offers to buy Ruth from her fanatical foster father, but Ruth gets Mr. Bell to marry her instead, creating a series of fraught and unsettling triangular relationships. Fourteen years later, Cora, Ruth’s heavily pregnant niece, stumbles through woods and along highways, following her now mute and enigmatic aunt without understanding why. Wry, absurd, and occasionally silly humor punctures the weighty themes of motherhood, aging, and loss. “We’re the Society for Confusing Literature and the Real Lies,” a woman explains to Cora at an event on the Erie Canal in which Captain Ahab and Huck Finn compete with Lord Nelson and a German U-boat. Apparent non sequiturs pepper the dialogue throughout, and while at first they give the story a stilted quality, the seemingly random details soon stitch together into a larger meaning. Cora’s pregnancy is a natural metaphor for bridging the tiny with the universal, and the novel is rife with chewy metaphors and similes that require careful parsing. At times, the novel’s murky obscurity may be vexing—a passage featuring a tight-lipped runaway nun is particularly gnomic—but the drip of information and layers of potent imagery keep the pages turning.

A truly fantastic novel in which the blurring of natural and supernatural creates a stirring, visceral conclusion.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-544-52670-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | PARANORMAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNWRITTEN BOOK
by Samantha Hunt

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by Samantha Hunt

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THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE
by Samantha Hunt

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OF MICE AND MEN

by John Steinbeck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1936

Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

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Steinbeck refuses to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

This is as completely different from Tortilla Flat and In Dubious Battle as they are from each other. Only in his complete understanding of the proletarian mentality does he sustain a connecting link though this is assuredly not a "proletarian novel." It is oddly absorbing this picture of the strange friendship between the strong man and the giant with the mind of a not-quite-bright child. Driven from job to job by the failure of the giant child to fit into the social pattern, they finally find in a ranch what they feel their chance to achieve a homely dream they have built. But once again, society defeats them. There's a simplicity, a directness, a poignancy in the story that gives it a singular power, difficult to define. Steinbeck is a genius and an original.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1936

ISBN: 0140177396

Page Count: 83

Publisher: Covici, Friede

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1936

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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by John Steinbeck & edited by Thomas E. Barden

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STEINBECK
by John Steinbeck & edited by Robert DeMott

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICA AND AMERICANS
by John Steinbeck & edited by Susan Shillinglaw & Jackson J. Benson

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.