Huge, deep-delving movie-lover's delight—and as rich a novel about the metaphysics of moviemaking as has ever been—by the author of The Making of a Counter Culture and 1984's unconvincing Dreamwatcher. Sometime in the mid-1950's, UCLA student Jonathan Gates starts attending the grungy hole-in-the-wall art-film movie-house The Castle and catches up on postwar French and Italian films. A modest guy, he's taken under the wing of Clarissa Swann, who owns the theater and writes mimeographed handouts about every movie she plays (it's hard to miss strong overtones of Pauline Kael in Clare). Jonny falls spellbound by the Thirties trash films of Max Castle, the earliest of all film noir stylists, but Clare resists Castle's spell. Even so, she helps Jonny, now her lover, put together a master's thesis on Castle after she and Jonny meet the aged dwarf Lips Lipsky, who was once Castle's cameraman and has the original negatives of all of Castle's Hollywood films. Using a unique device of Lips's called a multifilter, Jonny discovers that all of Castle's films have secret scenes printed subliminally over the doctored negatives—scenes of ghastly obscenity that leave viewers feeling unclean and turned off of sex. In writing a book about Castle and reviewing silent films Castle made in Germany as a wonderchild, Jonny unearths Castle's ties to a secret order called Orphans of the Storm, or the Cathars, a heretical pre-Christian group allied to the Dark God whose doctrines aim to end mankind as a species by curbing sex for babies and putting in its place bhoga, a yogic sex practice that avoids union but is clearly terrific. Jonny's legwork leads him into the orphanages of the God of Darkness and also carries him into the Seventies' porn and gore of the Antichrist as he readies to move into television. We follow Castle's career as he works with Orson Welles on Citizen Kane and the abandoned Heart of Darkness, with John Huston on The Maltese Falcon, etc., while making his own zombie and vampire movies. The lore on cameras, lighting, editing and so on is riveting, as is the bimillennial secret doctrine of the Antichrist being fed into the movies since their beginnings (including Shirley Temple flicks). Not a horror novel.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-72831-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.
A body washed up on the shore of Lake Superior moves a family to rewrite its 100-year history in Webb's (The Vanishing, 2014, etc.) new novel, set equally in each era.
Lake Superior, which has always been known for its legends, one day reveals a new mystery when an unidentified body clutching an equally dead baby washes up on the shore near Kate Granger’s family home. Kate, who’s come to town only recently in an attempt to recover from a breakup with her philandering husband, is captivated by the young woman, who’s been appearing to her in dreams. Police know the family too well to suspect Kate was involved in the crime, and she’s allowed to travel within the area to stay with her cousin Simon at the Harrison’s House, a stately former family home the unerringly nice Simon inherited and that he and his partner, Jonathan, have revamped into a B&B. Interspersed with chapters about Kate’s search for the identity of the body is the story of Great Bay in 1889 and the early life of Addie Cassatt and her friend Jess Stewart. Addie’s story sounds almost like a fable, from her birth in a lake that seems to love her to her first meeting with Jess, a boy who seems fated to be always by her side. Things grow more complicated when Jess goes away to college and begins to wonder about life beyond his small town and to ask whether Addie can be the woman he needs to help him achieve his professional dreams. As Addie learns about the limits of love, Kate learns that love may return when she’s introduced to Nick, a police officer willing to invest as much time in identifying the body as Kate is. With the support of Simon and Nick, Kate tries to learn from her dreams and believe the impossible, even if it means connecting the body to a centuries-old mystery entangled with Kate and Simon’s own family history.
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0082-0
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gloriously exciting yarn whose spell will end the moment you turn the last page.
What’s worse than learning that your wife’s been abducted and murdered by a madman? Learning that she hasn’t—in this taut, twisty dose of suspenseful hokum from the gifted chronicler of sleuthing sports-agent Myron Bolitar (Darkest Fear, 2000, etc.).
For all the pain Manhattan pediatrician Dr. David Beck has suffered in the eight years since his childhood sweetheart Elizabeth, his bride of seven months, was torn away from him and later found dead, the case itself was open and shut: She was tortured, branded, and slain by the perp calling himself KillRoy, now doing life on 14 counts of homicide. But the case pops open again with the discovery of two corpses buried near the murder site, along with the baseball bat that was used to incapacitate Beck during the abduction, and with a jolting e-mail Beck’s received from somebody who looks just like Elizabeth. If the message is bogus, how was it faked? And if it’s genuine, why has Elizabeth been hiding for eight years, why has she come back now, and whose body did her father, New York homicide cop Hoyt Parker, identify as hers and bury in her grave? A face-to-face rendezvous that Beck’s mysterious correspondent sets up in Washington Square promises answers—but when it’s time for the meeting, Beck is being hunted by the police for a murder a lot less than eight years old. Aided by celebrity lawyer Hester Crimstein, grateful drug-dealer Tyrese Barton, and his own sister Linda’s lover—that glamorous plus-size model Shauna—Beck goes up against even more improbable foes, from ruthless zillionaire developer Griffin Scope to bare-hands killer Eric Wu, in a quest for answers that’ll have you burning the midnight oil till 3:00
Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33555-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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