Picking the wrong photo from an escort service's book sends Philadelphia ad exec Ruth Lasseter careening into a nightmare of murder and obsession. Ruth's just looking for somebody presentable to bring to an office party that her lover and his suspicious wife will be attending. But she gets more, much more, after her subsequent one-night stand with good-looking Tim Hagan. Tim is evidently so besotted with Ruth that he won't let her break it offand if she could look into his past, she'd see how badly he handles rejection. In what seems like the crest of her terror, quietly demented Tim kidnaps her from her office; but although she's rescued by security guard Aidan Kincannon, her nightmare only deepens. A year later, even after the police have called her and Aidan to identify Tim's body (fat lot they know), she's still convinced he's out there watching herand of course she's right. Working with Aidan and against the police and the fedswho want to deport her to Britain: she's lost the job that guaranteed her status, and there's the little matter of an unlicensed gunshe traces her tormentor to his sordid roots in Louisiana. Only now does Gallagher (Nightmare, with Angel, 1993) allow the slam-bang pace of his story to flag, as he labors to fill in dysfunctional family background that makes Tim more human but distinctly less intimidating. (It doesn't help his reputation that some of his victims, like Tim himself, show a lamentably anticlimactic disinclination to stay dead.) This modulation, though, prepares for an original and chilling payoff: Ruth, echoing Tim's original mothlike attraction to her, becomes so obsessed with himwith finding him, killing him, dying together with himthat it begins to look as if the real danger is to anybody who might get in her way. A satisfyingly twisty suspenser with a truly menacing villain. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild alternate selections)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-38644-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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