A light, enjoyable horror story, with just the right amount of creepiness for younger readers.
In this middle-grade novel, a teenage girl may have to rescue her little brother when his Halloween mask takes on a life of its own.
Now that she’s a teen, Laura is forgoing trick-or-treating in favor of this year’s Halloween party with classmates. But Mom insists she take her 7-year-old brother, Trevor, trick-or-treating, as he’s still too young to go alone. The two decide to get masks at a peculiar local shop, which recently opened at the old mall that other stores have abandoned. Doctor Blaack’s Mask Shop is jampacked with masks, and by the time Laura encounters the owner, Trevor has wandered off. She and Blaack finally discover the terrified boy donning a mouse mask that refuses to come off. Though they can’t remove the mask, Blaack assures them it will fall off precisely at midnight tomorrow—Halloween. Luckily, the next day at school is a costume day, so Trevor doesn’t stand out. But the mask not only seems to be growing, it’s also gradually taking over Trevor, talking when it wants and even directing him where it wants to go. And as it turns out, if Trevor isn’t in a specified place by midnight, the mask will stay on his face permanently. Rasnic Tem’s (Ubo, 2017, etc.) horror tale, with shades of R.L. Stine’s The Haunted Mask, is an equal blend of fun and spine-tingling episodes. Blaack, for one, is eccentric but not outright malevolent. He’s also discernible, as he tends to bray his vowels (“That’s quite all ri-ight, my dear”). Much of the humor is understated and doesn’t derail the plot. The school’s costume parade, for example, is amusing but unquestionably chaotic: “Vampires and cowboys and aliens and kitty cats stood around talking and laughing and being just generally loud and way too annoying.” In the same vein, the mask, or “mouse head,” as the narrative eventually dubs it, becomes the book’s tangible villain. Certain traits, like an impossibly long tongue, leave a lasting and unsettling impression.
A light, enjoyable horror story, with just the right amount of creepiness for younger readers.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997736-0-4
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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