As ever, the finest horror collection going, with no leaning on hackwork.
Horrormeister Jones defends his collections against Internet carpings that he favors British writers in his horror annual. While two thirds of the present one is British, that’s not the usual balance. And much British material was first published in the US, while other stuff was taken from e-books and small press publications.
The 72-page introduction is astounding, a survey of the horror field for the past year that covers every nook and cranny, from George Lucas’s $400 million earnings to Stephen King’s e-book flop with The Plant to his new $40 million three-book contract with Simon & Schuster, and $65 million earnings, to J. K. Rowlings’s $42 million rake in and the failed plagiarism suit against her. Jones goes deep underground as well, assisted by Kim Newman, in rounding up the dead for the collection’s 40-page annual necrology: farewell Curt Siodmak (age 98), scripter of Universal’s The Wolf Man and dozens of other horror flicks, goodbye Robert Cormier and L. Sprague de Camp, adieu John Gielgud of Frankenstein: The True Story, and a deep bow to stage actor/director Stuart Lancaster (Batman Returns, as well as the lead in Hamlet for a Little Theatre production in which the present reviewer played Bernardo 45 years ago). Top choices herein include two excerpts from Kim Newman’s coming fourth Anno Dracula volume, Johnny Alucard, a film noir piece. In “Castle in the Desert,” a detective meets a 550-year-old lady vampire who tells him about Noah Cross (the John Huston character in Chinatown) moving all the stones of Manderley to the desert in 1920, while in Newman’s “The Other Side of Midnight,” a hymn to Orson Welles and his unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles is filming the last days of Dracula, with John Huston as the lead. Also on hand: Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja.
As ever, the finest horror collection going, with no leaning on hackwork.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0919-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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