Fanciful trimmings can’t disguise Mullen’s failure to fully penetrate a vanished world.
Two brothers keep robbing banks after they’re dead in this turgid Depression-era novel from Mullen (The Last Town on Earth, 2006).
Jason Fireson and his younger brother Whit (aka the Firefly Brothers) come back to life in the police morgue in Points North, Ind. They gingerly examine their gunshot wounds—ugly, but they’ll heal, and they’re no longer bleeding. The Firesons will have two more resurrections before they finally die. What’s the point of these Twilight Zone episodes in an otherwise realistic novel? Near the end, the author offers an explanation rooted in family dynamics, but their real purpose is to vault the brothers into the exalted company of such legendary robbers as Dillinger. It doesn’t work. Jason and Whit remain run-of-the-mill lawbreakers, their glamour borrowed, their attributes secondhand, their resurrections attended by bathos; one accomplice, confronted by their revived corpses, says, “I need to go lie down.” They were raised, along with their law-abiding milquetoast of a brother, Weston, in the manufacturing town of Lincoln City, Ohio. Their highly ethical father owned a small grocery store and was outraged by Jason’s decision to work for bootleggers, a move that twice landed him in prison. Pop himself is jailed after allegedly murdering a business partner, another puzzle only solved at the end. The brothers’ final heists and three deaths occur during two weeks in August 1934. That’s a nice, compact time frame, sabotaged by frequent flashbacks, point-of-view switches and Mullen’s determination to cram in as much canned Depression background as he can. He regales us with breadlines, Hoovervilles, reverse evictions and those brutal marathon dances. There’s also a subplot involving the kidnapping of Jason’s moll, or rather super-moll, beautiful automotive heiress Darcy Windham. By the end we’re too exhausted to care who ratted out Jason, a betrayal that led to the shootings in Points North and the brothers’ hectic final days.
Fanciful trimmings can’t disguise Mullen’s failure to fully penetrate a vanished world.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6753-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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