A delightfully eerie tale led by a likable and steadfast protagonist.
In this debut supernatural novel, a woman’s life in Vancouver turns into a whirlwind of romantic encounters, nightmares of demons, and strange voices inside her home.
Cali Stenson, 24, isn’t exactly fond of her temp job in customer service at Tony’s Furniture Giant. But some promising events happen all at once. She gets a promotion to a permanent gig, makes friends with a few colleagues, and learns that her aloof boss, Sean Stock, may actually be disguising his attraction to her. But while things are looking up at work, her modest house, where she lives with her female cat, Dallas, is a source of agitation. For most of her life, Cali has been plagued by “weird stuff”—unknown voices, recurrent nightmares, and unexplained occurrences, such as lights turning on by themselves. Moving from her childhood home in Toronto to Vancouver hasn’t changed anything, and lately she’s having trouble distinguishing dreams from memories or reality. Soon she is seeing visions, like someone in her backyard, and has reason to believe some dreams are premonitions. There seems to be a threat from the red-eyed demon in her nightmares, but as it turns out, the greatest danger facing Cali may be human and closer than she knows. Cali’s first-person perspective is rife with vivid details, such as lengthy scenes at Tony’s Furniture that center on Cali and Sean’s developing relationship. But this suits Marie’s novel, which is an engrossing hodgepodge of supernatural episodes, from ghostly figures to unnerving dreams with people Cali knows (for example, her sister). Moreover, the highlighted romance is complicated by Deacon Hall, a manufacturer’s rep with an unveiled interest in Cali. Despite her burdens, Cali is a self-assured woman. The story’s only flaw is occasionally trite dialogue or narration (“But I was a grown-ass woman now”). Fortunately, this hardly affects a number of genuinely nail-biting moments, like a dream demon grabbing Cali’s ankles and dragging her off the sofa.
A delightfully eerie tale led by a likable and steadfast protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-3119-4
Page Count: 193
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2018
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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