An intermittently effective suspense tale that should satisfy die-hard horror buffs.
Seeking shelter from a massive rainstorm, two teenagers stumble into a psychopath’s hideout and must fight for their lives in McWhorter’s (Swallowing the Worm and Other Stories, 2015, etc.) gory debut novel.
Three teenage girls have gone missing in the sleepy town of New Paris, Ohio. Did they belong to a suicide cult? Or did they flee to new lives in New York City or Los Angeles? To escape these swirling rumors, high school seniors Luke and Garrett head out on a weekend fishing trip. Their chipper mood is soon interrupted by “menacing clouds, the color of gunmetal,” foreshadowing the violent downpour that follows. In the midst of the storm, Luke and Garrett’s boat breaks down, so they wander down eerily empty roads until they find a private driveway that leads to the run-down, abandoned New Congregational Church. At least it seems abandoned—upon closer inspection, Luke and Garrett discover an empty coffin in the middle of the sanctuary, simple drawings bearing the names of the missing girls, and a teenage girl they don’t recognize wearing a cheerleading uniform from their high school. Right after this discovery, Luke is knocked unconscious. He wakes up inside the coffin; outside, he hears the mysterious girl, who informs Luke that she and her father have been harvesting the bones of their victims. Luke manages to escape, and he unearths even more of the church’s grisly secrets as he struggles to survive a bloody cat-and-mouse game with the girl and her father. In this horror novel, McWhorter too often relies on his readers’ assumed knowledge of horror tropes to do his work for him—one character’s scream, for instance, “was like something out of a horror movie. Like nothing I’d ever heard.” Also, Luke’s narration tends to be somewhat vague and uninspired. However, McWhorter’s sections from the demented girl’s perspective are unforgettably creepy: “But, she knew her father’s work. She knew what his knives did to the human body and how much blood they brought out.”
An intermittently effective suspense tale that should satisfy die-hard horror buffs.Pub Date: July 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-937979-15-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: PlotForge, Limited
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2015
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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