A thoroughly effective horror page-turner from an author who’s mastered the genre.
Drago follows up his debut novel (Crow Creek, 2014) with another tale of small-town horror in the tradition of Stephen King.
Drago’s adroit and adrenaline-fueled second novel begins when a gaunt man in a hospital gown staggers into a small-town diner and begins vomiting “dark gristle.” The man has empty sockets where his eyes should be, and his body is studded with electrode ports. And as fast as you can say “illicit genetic experimentation,” we learn the man had once been an employee of EnTech, an experimental microbiology outfit located in the North Carolina town of Queensboro. EnTech is run by Drago’s truly hissable villainess, Margaret Ganis, who has “a high tuft of snow white hair and an unmistakable vascular birthmark across the left side of her face that looked like a red harpy’s wing” and whose skin “seems to bubble under the surface with tiny maggots.” When a local girl named Ashley Smith goes missing and some townsfolk assemble to search for her, they’re shockingly introduced to yet more evidence of dark biological tampering: seal-sized “death worms” that can suck the blood out of a grown human in seconds. Drago expertly balances the visceral thrills of such inhuman creatures against the far more premeditated evils of Ganis and her law enforcement henchman, Sheriff Waylon Osbourne, a hugely fat and wisecracking prominent Klan member who is, against all odds, the most enjoyable of the novel’s many well-drawn characters. Drago incorporates the cast (and some events) from his first novel so seamlessly that this book can be read independently, and although he still relies a bit too heavily on an array of Stephen King–style gimmicks (overly simplistic local yokels, especially; actual small-town residents will have to read this stuff with the usual forbearance), his dialogue crackles with wit, and his sense of dramatic pacing never fails him. In traditional horror-genre style, Drago orchestrates a climactic confrontation between the forces of good and evil that leaves much of Queensboro in ruins—and will leave readers very much wanting more from this author.
A thoroughly effective horror page-turner from an author who’s mastered the genre.Pub Date: April 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0692411278
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Gold Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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