None
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Kansas again, Toto, Epperson (The Moons of Summer, 1994, etc.) ladles up another middle-American passel of sociopaths, felons, and just plain weirdos. There must be something in the water: Practically everybody in Epperson's judiciously unnamed Kansas neighborhood is up to something unspeakable. Riverpark Hospital chief of staff Clyde Conlan has taken his stricken brother Thomas home to die without telling Thomas's private nurse of his fear that her patient has smallpox. Craig Peterwell, who really likes birds, goes home from his Riverpark maintenance job to a wife whose carping he's had just about enough of. Craig is watched to varying effect by Mark Vaughn, a former burglar who's still out for the odd score, and by Chance Morley, a retarded adult who's the obvious suspect in the disappearance of 12-year-old Cyndi Melo. In this tinderbox, it's only a matter of time before something gives, and the something is Louise Peterwell's legs when Craig suddenly swings at her with a two-by-four, provoking an oddly related chain of reactions both ghoulish and funny. (Funniest moments: Chance setting Craig's birds free because he thinks he hears them pleading to get out; Craig dutifully consulting a psychiatrist and deciding he needs to put his relationship with Louise on a more positive basis.) In fact, Zane Campbell, the ex-cop who turned ocularist when a bullet rearranged his own face, and his two relatively normal boys have such a ripe basket of loonies to pick from that the revelation of who snatched (and killed) Cyndi is inevitably anticlimactic—any of these folks could have done it, no problem. It would take a Carl Hiaasen to sustain the demented tone of this feverish fantasy to the end, but you have to admire the unbridled imagination that peopled Epperson's neighborhood—even if you wouldn't want to risk living next door to the author yourself.
None NonePub Date: Nov. 27, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-466-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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