Another surefire horror outing with realistic heroes from a new specialist in the genre.
This third installment of a series examines apocalyptic events in the heart of the American South.
Picking up where his previous book left off, Drago (Queensboro, 2015, etc.) returns to the small and seemingly ordinary North Carolina town of Crow Creek, the center of that earlier adventure, and to several characters from that horror tale, including Sheriff Brad Gleason, his ex-wife Shana, and “a certain band of inadequate heroes” who’d saved the day (and quite possibly the world). As this new novel opens, twin catastrophes are looming: first, Amanda Simmons, the nefarious owner of the ambitiously evil biotech company Carolina Entech, plots to rebuild the neighboring town of Winter, which was hit by two atomic bombs back in 1960. Second, just as the plot begins to unfold, Drago’s extended cast of characters—Pastor Thomas Rhodes, a man named Black Jesus, Pastor Aken, Britisher Peter Bally, and a handful of others—gets caught up in a strange, sudden phenomenon: an energy pulse that knocks out all technology in one pregnant instant (“like a stage actor in the West End holding a beat for dramatic effect,” as Peter characterizes it). Gleason and Rhodes, having been tasked by the U.S. government with investigating the goings-on in Winter, must deal with ancient cults, corporate evil, and the walking dead. It’s the kind of overheated stew Drago seems to enjoy preparing, and he once again does a winning, skillful job, combining increasingly over-the-top, Stephen King-style horror elements with a quietly confident and quite convincing portrait of everyday life in the North Carolina Piedmont region. His heroes are believable strivers with feet of clay, and his ear for the rhythms of their dialogue helps to bring them alive. And as in the previous Crow Creek work, the book’s villains are energetically drawn and its sense of evil itself is both starkly Baptist and refreshingly complicated (“That’s what the Devil does,” readers are told at one point. “Don’t so much as go for you as make you go for him”).
Another surefire horror outing with realistic heroes from a new specialist in the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-78280-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Gold Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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