Jones again shows that horror can be as richly felt and well-written as mainstream fiction. The present overview of the past year’s output brings back many familiar names (Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Ligotti, etc.) as well as lesser knowns, and it offers the terrific yearly necrology (written with Kim Newman) of writers, artists, performers, and technicians who made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction, and fantasy genres during their lifetimes and died in 1997. Also included are addresses of organizations, booksellers, and other sources of market information. No less valuable is Jones’s long and thorough introduction, which covers both sides of the Atlantic. There’s news about horror fiction (one third of it in 1997 was for young adults), about Stephen King (who went from Viking to Simon & Schuster for a profit-sharing deal that could net him 50—75 percent royalties), and about the likes of Dean Koontz, John Saul, and even Bram Stoker, on his Dracula centenary. As for the readings, a standout piece is David J. Schow’s “Dying Words,” about a nettled horror author driving himself sick as a victim of his own “shitty writing” on a zombie book. With the volume opening on a note like that, could the final story, Douglas E. Winter’s “The Zombies of Madison County,” possibly fail? (After all, it’s about what happens to character/writer Douglas E. Winter when writing too many zombie stories turns him into . . . .) Definitely not to be missed is Kim Newman’s fabulous pastiche, “Coppola’s Dracula” (the opening of Newman’s forthcoming novel Johnny Alucard), about the “good movie” Coppola might have made of Dracula (hey, Kim, some of us like that movie), serving also as a follow-up to Newman’s Fellini takeoff, Judgment of Tears (British title: Dracula Cha Cha Cha). Enough delectable storytelling to raise the dead for a nightcap of print.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7867-0585-X
Page Count: 494
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.
Walker (In Love and Trouble, Meridian) has set herself the task of an epistolary novel—and she scores strongly with it.
The time is in the Thirties; a young, black, Southern woman named Celie is the primary correspondent (God being her usual addressee); and the life described in her letters is one of almost impossible grimness. While young, Celie is raped by a stepfather. (Even worse, she believes him to be her real father.) She's made to bear two children that are then taken away from her. She's married off without her consent to an older man, Albert, who'd rather have Celie's sister Nettie—and, by sacrificing her body to Albert without love or feeling, Celie saves her sister, making it possible for her to escape: soon Nettle goes to Africa to work as a Christian missionary. Eventually, then, halfway through the book, as Celie's sub-literate dialect letters to God continue to mount (eventually achieving the naturalness and intensity of music, equal in beauty to Eudora Welty's early dialect stories), letters from Nettie in Africa begin to arrive. But Celie doesn't see them—because Albert holds them back from her. And it's only when Celie finds an unlikely redeemer—Albert's blues-singer lover Shug Avery—that her isolation ends: Shug takes Celie under her wing, becomes Celie's lover as well as Albert's; Shug's strength and expansiveness and wisdom finally free up Nettie's letters—thus granting poor Celie a tangible life in the now (Shug's love, encouragement) as well as a family life, a past (Nettie's letters). Walker fashions this book beautifully—with each of Celie's letters slowly adding to her independence (the implicit feminism won't surprise Walker's readers), with each letter deepening the rich, almost folk-tale-ish sense of story here. And, like an inverted pyramid, the novel thus builds itself up broadeningly while balanced on the frailest imaginable single point: the indestructibility—and battered-ness—of love.
A lovely, painful book: Walker's finest work yet.Pub Date: June 28, 1982
ISBN: 0151191549
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
The previous books of this author (Devil of a State, 1962; The Right to an Answer, 1961) had valid points of satire, some humor, and a contemporary view, but here the picture is all out—from a time in the future to an argot that makes such demands on the reader that no one could care less after the first two pages.
If anyone geta beyond that—this is the first person story of Alex, a teen-age hoodlum, who, in step with his times, viddies himself and the world around him without a care for law, decency, honesty; whose autobiographical language has droogies to follow his orders, wallow in his hate and murder moods, accents the vonof human hole products. Betrayed by his dictatorial demands by a policing of his violence, he is committed when an old lady dies after an attack; he kills again in prison; he submits to a new method that will destroy his criminal impulses; blameless, he is returned to a world that visits immediate retribution on him; he is, when an accidental propulsion to death does not destroy him, foisted upon society once more in his original state of sin.
What happens to Alex is terrible but it is worse for the reader.
Pub Date: Jan. 8, 1962
ISBN: 0393928098
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1962
SEEN & HEARD
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