A sex-heavy vampire thriller with an L.A.-noir detective-story framework and a triple dose of cunnilingus, fellatio, and nipple pinching that actually drives the plot. In 1994’s Love Bite (not reviewed), L.A. homicide dick Jace Levy fell in love with Risha, a 50-year-old vampire who looks 30 and, since his retirement from the force after 20 years of service, has taken up residence with her. She sleeps all day, has extensible fangs, does not show up in mirrors, has eternal life, and so on. Will Jace ever join her? Well, unbeknownst to Risha, Jace has Huntington’s chorea, and his growing mental lapses and physical collapses worry him deeply. Meanwhile, as a p.i., he’s taken on a new client: Robert Brandon, whose Right Path Films trade on high morality, and who is being blackmailed for some naughty videos he made with actresses auditioning for his new releases. Amusingly, these videos are based on scenes from famous films—Rhett taking Scarlett up the big staircase to rape her, Rick and Ilsa getting down to the bare facts when he won—t hand over the letters of transit, Charlie Alnutt busting Rosie’s hymen on The African Queen. The most original turn comes when Jace at last induces Risha to take him into her world, even though he hasn—t told her about his fatal illness and doesn—t know what effect his blood might have on her. Nor does he know that the life of the undead will drain not only his morals about murdering for his food but also his sexual potency. The idea of eternal life without the full use of the penis is unbearable. Probably the kickoff for a vampire series for Gottlieb—a series whose main claim to distinction amid the forests of California Gothic is likely to be those film parodies.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-87392-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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
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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