Leaving Viking for the storied literary patina of Scribner, current or not, King seemingly strives on the page for a less vulgar gloss. And he eases from horror into romantic suspense, while adding dollops of the supernatural. The probable model: structural echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca do sound forth, although King never writes one paragraph herein to match du Maurier’s opening moonscapes of Manderley. What comes through nevertheless is a strong pull to upgrade his style and storytelling in this his 50th year. Yes, he actually does write better if with less energy and power than in Desperation (1996). In fact, attacking the race problem in lily-white Maine, he even assumes an almost Dreiserian seriousness in his final paragraphs. Well, the story: romantic-suspense novelist Michael Noonan, who summers in Castle Rock on Dark Score Lake, falls into a four-year writer’s block when his wife Johanna dies of a brain blowout. Now 40 and childless, Mike has salted away four extra novel manuscripts in his safe-deposit box, one of them 11 years old (shades of Richard Bachman!), and keeps up a pretense of productivity by publishing a “new” novel each year. Meanwhile, he finds himself falling for Mattie Devore, a widowed mother half his age. Mattie’s late husband is the son of still-thriving half-billionaire computer king Max Devore, 85 years old and monstrous, who plans to gain possession of Mattie’s three-year-old daughter, the banally drawn Kyra. Mike’s first big question: Did Johanna cuckold him during his long hours writing? If so, will her character reverse our understanding of her, as does Rebecca de Winter’s? And how can he help Mattie fight off Max and keep Kyra? The supernatural elements, largely reserved for the interracial climax, are Standard King but fairly mild. Philosophically limited but a promising artistic shift for a writer who tried something like this with 1995’s failure, Rose Madder.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-85350-7
Page Count: 529
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
Impressively assured and insightful.
First-novelist Ellis makes an auspicious debut with this imaginatively rendered psychological suspense thriller set in an upstate New York town inhabited entirely by mediums and spiritualists.
Naomi Ash has a secret she's kept for ten years. She knows where a body is buried—not because she's a medium and converses with dead spirits, but because it’s the corpse of her boyfriend, and she's the one who buried it. Now 31, Naomi came to Train Line, New York, where spiritualists live and ply their trade, as a child, when her mother (herself a medium) moved there from New Orleans. Following in her mother's footsteps, Naomi `sees` dead people for a living, although it’s such a meager one that she must also take odd jobs, including baby-sitting and working in a library, to make ends meet. She’s going nowhere and remains haunted by the ten-year-old murder that resulted in her planting a visiting grad student in a secret location. But now that her boyfriend’s body has been found, Naomi knows it's only a matter of time before he's identified and she falls under suspicion. In impeccable prose, Ellis weaves a fascinating tale of guilt and redemption. She also plumbs the depths of spiritualism: What is real and what isn't? Where does life begin, and where, if ever, does it end? “My empty heart was collapsing in on itself,” Naomi muses. “A lonely life is a crime without witnesses, it is a movie playing in a locked theater; can you ever be sure what happens in it? Can you be sure that it happens at all?” Similarly exquisite writing can be found throughout this well-crafted tale. Ellis encourages readers to see their own fears and longings in the eccentric inhabitants of a highly unusual town, reminding us that most differences are simply matters of appearance.
Impressively assured and insightful.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89242-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
At their best, Laymon's cackling horrors (The Stake, 1991; Night Visions 7, 1989) are the nastiest around—sleek, black- humored, skirting (if not slipping over) the edge of pornoviolence. Here, though, he injects them into a floundering picaresque historical about Jack the Ripper—set partly in the Old West- -resulting in his only seriously dull book yet. Even Laymon's usual thrumming prose is missing here, replaced by a faux-plucky narration (``It wasn't a job I could walk away from''; ``Right then I vowed to save her'') by 15-year-old Londoner Trevor Bentley, who, one dark-and-stormy night in 1988, goes searching for a bobby to corral the lout who's beaten his mom. Wandering the streets, Trevor is attacked by thugs who strip him; seeking clothes, he breaks into an apartment but hides under the bed when the occupant returns—a whore accompanied by none other than the Ripper, who mutilates the woman while the boy cowers inches below: a wicked beginning that Laymon soon squanders. Trevor follows ``the fiend'' only to be shanghaied—along with luscious young Trudy Armitage—aboard the Armitage family yacht, which the Ripper has pirated, aiming to sail to the fresh killing-ground of America. Sundry tortures, mostly of Trudy, make the voyage pass quickly; arriving in the US, the Ripper rips Trudy and escapes, trailed by Trevor, who loses his prey but is taken in by a retired general and his daughter, who tutors the boy in sex. Long months later, reading of savage murders in Tombstone, Trevor rides the rails west, where he takes up with outlaws, dallies with yet another pretty girl, and, at last, confronts the Ripper in a blood- spouting finale. Laymon dedicates this meandering mistake to his agent, who, he says, suggested ``an English setting...so this book is your fault.'' Okay—but Laymon himself should have known better. And next time, with luck, will.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10537-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
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