by Tristan Egolf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2006
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
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by Cormac McCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2006
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
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National Book Critics Circle Finalist
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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by Khaled Hosseini ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2003
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
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Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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by Khaled Hosseini ; illustrated by Dan Williams
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