An unusual and artistically ambitious—but convoluted—account of a New York City gripped by fear.
A thriller chronicles a metropolis’ descent into moral chaos.
The summer of 1977 was an infamously tumultuous time for New York City. It was plagued by economic malaise, civic unrest, and a crime wave that created a sense that anarchy was overtaking the five boroughs. To make matters worse, a serial killer—the Son of Sam—terrorized residents, his acts of random violence punctuating the city’s downward spiral into lawlessness. In his novel, Lanter (If the Sun Should Ask, 2016) captures the sense of moral decline and trepidation that hung over the city like a storm cloud (“The Big Apple is unsettled, grimacing with a collective angst. The City is besieged by crime. Homicide is advancing at an alarming rate—upwards of four a day—mostly young women”). He focuses on the Son of Sam as a sign of the encroaching darkness. There is some sharp comic relief—the police hire an eccentric clairvoyant to aid their investigation, and her erudite, otherworldly asides are memorable. And Mathias Teivel, a television producer, opportunistically—and often hilariously—tries to figure out how to work the city’s obsession with the Son of Sam into the cop show Kojak. The narrative is experimentally nonlinear, and the authorial perspective leaps from third-person omniscience to the Son of Sam to another killer inspired by him. Or, so it seems—the prose is frenetic and dense, and the maniacally paced story is all but impossible to follow. Characters are bestowed numerous monikers—“Super Sleuth,” “Super Swinging Dick,” “Dynamic Duck,” “The Duke of Death”—so it’s often confusing who is being referred to. In addition, the author’s dense, adjective-laden, and alliteration-addicted style is always challenging and sometimes incoherent: “Sam grins, malocclusion, rotted yellow teeth glinting in the pale of a weak winter-sun metal-halide gas-discharge medium arc-length lamp.” Similarly, the book’s gritty realism is undermined by inexplicably fantastical dialogue. Still, Lanter displays a knack for making the implausible tantalizingly credible—the city’s moral turpitude leads some to believe in an old urban myth that once a certain threshold of collective evil is traversed, Satan himself will appear to direct the self-destruction. But too much intelligibility is sacrificed on the altar of literary novelty, and it’s never clear why Lanter chose such an idiosyncratic style, especially one incongruous with the signature idiom of New York in the ’70s.
An unusual and artistically ambitious—but convoluted—account of a New York City gripped by fear.Pub Date: May 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9838412-3-4
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Twiss Hill Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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