Introducing this ninth volume of an usually vigorous series, F. Paul Wilson decrees that horror is ``not dead''; the mostly lackluster tales that follow, though, say little for the genre's state of health. A prime case in point is ``The Dreams of Dr. Ladybank,'' the gruesome lead-off novella by Tessier (Rapture, 1987, etc.) that treads no new ground even as it takes full advantage of the publisher's proclaimed tolerance of explicit sex and gore. Dr. Ladybank is a sadistic telepathic psychiatrist whose mental reach extends only to Tony, a 16-year-old transvestite prostitute, and to Snake, a vile drug-dealer. Within graphic scenes of masturbation, anal stimulation, murder, and dismemberment, Ladybank toys with his two guinea pigs until one stabs him in the eye. A distasteful tale, but Tessier, a careful stylist, just salvages it with lively prose and genuine sympathy for his grimy characters. Not so Kisner (Nero's Vice, 1981), whose ``Fugyu'' crudely reiterates Tessier's hackneyed theme of the vengeance of the oppressed by having a foul baglady dispense with a madman who's been killing homeless people. Two other weak Kisner tales deal with vampirism (sentimentally) and Jack the Ripper (portentously). His remaining pair, however, display glimmers of wicked humor, particularly ``Moose Oysters,'' in which a hunted beast turns bloody, ironic tables on its hunters. Popular mass-market-novelist Hautala (The Moonstone, etc.) winds up the collection with its only genuinely entertaining work, ``Untcigahunk,'' four linked and suspensefully chilling, if truncated, tales of traditional gory horror in which an ancient race, deformed cousin of humanity, wreaks havoc throughout Maine. Undistinguished horror: these night visions are, for the most part, grainy and dim.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1991
ISBN: 0-913165-63-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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