A smart, smoothly written horror tale in the King vein.
In Zell’s (Urban Limit, 2016, etc.) somewhat nostalgic horror novel, a young boy is far more than he seems.
This tale begins innocuously enough, in the mid-1960s, with single mother Brit Helm moving from Phoenix to the suburban town of LaVista in Southern California. She’s doing her best to be both parent and friend to her 12-year-old son, Michael, but they’re still grieving the loss of Michael’s older brother, Nicky, and their new home, choked in dust and mildew, is a far cry from their previous one, with its swimming pool and mountain view. Michael is also now the new kid in LaVista, facing the usual social minefield, which includes a pretty surfer girl named Sandy Randall. Brit has her hands full, too, as she tries to settle in, find a good job, and keep a watchful eye on Michael. Subtly and gradually, Zell makes readers aware of the fact that Brit’s worries about her son extend beyond mere protectiveness: “From the moment they’d placed Michael in her arms, she knew this one is different.” In carefully doled-out increments, we begin to learn the nature and extent of that difference, interwoven with the stuff of ordinary childhood as Michael experiences a crush, obsesses over movie monsters, and keeps an eye out for potential bullies. This is classic Stephen King territory—indeed, this book will certainly appeal to King fans—and Zell knows his way around it, gradually darkening the tones of his plot as it progresses toward a climax that effectively blends psychological and supernatural elements. The book is also saturated with the music of its 1960s period. Brand names are highlighted with a touch too much regularity—the kids ride Schwinn bicycles, of course; Michael sets his record player on a stacked set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and so on. That said, Zell’s enthusiasm for his material wins out over mere box-checking.
A smart, smoothly written horror tale in the King vein.Pub Date: June 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9847468-3-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Tales From Zell
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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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