An unholy mess, but a ride well worth taking. And do look for the Kornwolf sooner or later at your nearby multiplex.
Multiple incarnations of the title beast terrorize rural “Pennsyltucky” in this raucous third, and last novel from the late (1971–2005) Midwestern author.
As he did in its predecessors Lord of the Barnyard (1999) and Skirt and the Fiddle (2002), Egolf—who’s sort of a mutant amalgam of Jack Kerouac and Harry Crews—lampoons the heartland and its comfy values. But there’s something authentically weird about the Middle Americans of the hamlet of Blue Ball in Pennsylvania’s Stepford County—as native son and newspaper reporter Owen Brynmor learns when he returns “home” to investigate reports that “The Blue Ball Devil was back.” Indeed, a particularly grungy were-person has been devouring livestock, wrecking farmland and provoking policemen. And, as Owen’s further research suggests, it’s either the “Kornwolf” of European legend (“still reviled as a spirit of vengeance, a curse of the fields”) or the progeny of 16th-century German landowner and reputed incestuous cannibal Peter Stubbe. Or both. The resulting mayhem revolves around the local Amish community, led by tyrannical Minister Benedictus Bontrager, whose physically and emotionally abused son Ephraim is suspected of strange nocturnal misdeeds (“cow tipping” and much, much worse); a gang of louts known as the Crossbills; boxing coach Jack Stumpf, whose own demons are related to his Vietnam experience; and several ostensibly good country people with generations’ worth of skeletons in their blood-stained closets. The book is heady, over-the-top fun for much of its considerable length, but its effect is diffused by a seemingly endless Walpurgisnächt finale that unimaginatively apes the kill-‘em-all conventions of the teen slasher flick. Egolf had talent to burn, but stringent editing should have whittled this burly haywire tale down to fighting weight.
An unholy mess, but a ride well worth taking. And do look for the Kornwolf sooner or later at your nearby multiplex.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-7016-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Scouring contemporary insights—in prose as lithe and potent as vines in a rain forest.
Morrison's fine-tuned, high-strung characters this time—black and white Americans caught up together in a "wide and breezy" house on a Caribbean island—may lack the psychic wingspread of Sula or Milkman of Song of Solomon. Yet within the swift of her dazzlingly mythic/animistic fancies, and dialogue sharp as drum raps, they carry her speculations—about black and white relationships and black female identity—as lightly as racing silks. Slim, trim, coolly witty Valerian Street, a retired white Philadelphia candy manufacturer partnered by querulous second wife Margaret (once "Maine's Principal Beauty"), is the wily Prospero for his household of obligated attendants. The strange musics of the island, however, are heard better by the natives—like near-blind Theresa, who knows the island's slave legends. Somewhere in between are Valerian's excellent, elderly black retainers: butler Sidney, starched by his old pride in being "one of the industrious Philadelphia Negroes"; and his wife, Ondine the cook, who nurses swollen feet and curses the Principal Beauty. And the crown of Sidney and Ondine's lives is their stunning niece Jade, to whom Sidney serves food immaculately on silver trays as she dines with Valerian (who financed her superior education abroad). But this delicate assortment of nervous dependencies begins to shiver with the shattering arrival of Son, an unkempt American black man on the run, one of the "undocumented." Valerian, amused by the horror of the household, invites Son as a guest; once cleaned and beautiful, Son begins his courtship of Jade, a woman fearful of a devouring sexuality and a black affirmation. And then, at Christmas dinner, the six of this unlikely peaceable kingdom sit down together only to writhe in a lavaslide of raw, inter-locked revelation and ancient rage. Result: Jade and Son flee to the States, where she—an educated, restless city woman—has a future, while he has only a past: woman-cosseted, woman-dominating. She says: "Mama-spoiled black man, will you mature with me?" He says: "Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture are you bearing?" They try to rescue each other, but their lives cannot mesh: Jade will be a worker, a neuter, rejecting nurturing and heading for Paris; grieving Son will be led by Theresa to a ghostly liberation.
Scouring contemporary insights—in prose as lithe and potent as vines in a rain forest.Pub Date: March 12, 1981
ISBN: 978-0-394-42329-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1981
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.
A real-life racial incident is transfigured into a riveting thriller about two families’ heartbreaking struggles to confront and transcend rage and loss.
It is the late summer of 2019, but no matter how many years have passed, Shawn Matthews, a black ex-convict now working for a Los Angeles moving company, is burdened by memories of the early spring of 1991, when his teenage sister Ava was shot to death by a Korean woman who mistakenly believed she was stealing from her convenience store. The shooting and the resulting trial—in which the woman was convicted and received no jail time, after which she relocated to another part of LA—fed into racial tensions already festering back then from the Rodney King trial. And the city’s reactions to a present-day shooting death of an unarmed black teen by a police officer indicate that those racial animosities remain close to the boiling point. In the midst of the mounting furor, Grace Park, a young Korean woman, is shaken from her placid good nature by the sight of her mother being wounded in a drive-by shooting. “What if she is being punished?” her sister Miriam says, revealing a shocking fact about their mother's past that Grace hadn't known. An LAPD detective asks Shawn if he has an alibi for the drive-by (which he does). Nonetheless, the most recent shooting upends his fragile sense of security, and he starts to wonder where his cousin, Ray, himself just released from prison, was when Grace’s mother was shot. Cha, author of the Juniper Song series of detective novels (Dead Soon Enough, 2015, etc.), brings what she knows about crafting noir-ish mysteries into this fictionalized treatment of the 1991 Latasha Harlins murder, blending a shrewd knowledge of cutting-edge media and its disruptive impact with a warm, astute sensitivity toward characters of diverse cultures weighed down by converging traumas.
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286885-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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