Nuance becomes a little lost in the mix of monsters and humans, but an unwavering pace promises unending entertainment.
An evil, hellish entity attacks a small town in Washington, creating minions and plotting the destruction of humankind in this horror yarn.
When pregnant Elizabeth Holly is abducted by crazy ex-reverend Old Man Wilson, her husband, John, and daughter, Julia, manage to save her and her infant son. But Julia fears it may have been more than a mere kidnapping when her new baby brother, Waed, sports “the face of evil”—a twisted expression, dark eyes, and a long, thin tongue. Later, a nurse, following what seem to be Waed’s telepathic instructions, cuts hearts from people’s chests and flees the hospital with the child. Waed rapidly grows into the Beast and assaults citizens in Autumntown, either killing or infecting them, slowly building an army of creatures at his command. The townsfolk, including detective partners Del Camron and Jack Richards, soon learn the Beast is the Dark One, the guardian of darkness, with aspirations for hell to reign on Earth. Not quite at full power, the Beast needs to consume three particular kinds of hearts. Del, Jack, and others arm themselves to battle tentacled creatures, eventually called Leapers, and hopefully find a way to kill the Beast. The novel certainly isn’t short on action, with a myriad of confrontations between humans and monsters, making it sometimes hard to keep up with the scores of characters filling the pages. Moore (The Adventures of PJ and Split Pea Vol. II, 2010, etc.) wisely names a few of the more formidable Leapers, like Dairitch, the sinister soul of a trickster infused with an infected human. Conversely, some of the humans barely register, introduced immediately prior to their deaths or transformations into nameless creatures. Nevertheless, the back story involving a character’s father provides a strange but enthralling origin for the Beast, or at least explains why he chose Autumntown. The Beast, too, becomes gradually more terrifying as he garners more powers, such as levitation. The narrative does have its lighter moments; the humans’ surprisingly effective homemade defense, “monster acid” (a clever concoction best left unspoiled for readers), paves the way for cheerworthy combat moments.
Nuance becomes a little lost in the mix of monsters and humans, but an unwavering pace promises unending entertainment.Pub Date: June 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-1665-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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