paper 0-942979-61-3 Top-drawer horror stories, by the author of Centaur of the North (1996), that distance themselves from the genre routine by depending largely on fantasy, fun, and a wonderfully supple prose style. This is grand writing conveyed in the simplest words without the faintest hint of pulp fiction, although much of the subject matter comes from pop culture. In the title story, B. is a kind of horror vaudevillian who entertains at high school parties and other social affairs by giving the guests a taste of famous film monsters in memorable scenes from their best pictures. Thus, garishly costumed as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or a Teenage Werewolf, or Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, he reenacts passages that have him violating a young girl, who is played by the narrator, a small-bodied young man who can shriek like Fay Wray or any other scream queen. The eponymous male protagonist of “Robert’s Bride” works at the Oldsmobile factory, fastening emblems onto new cars, and is engaged to a beautician who faces endless reengineering (like an Olds) to bring her utterly dead beauty to its deepest polish. “Woman Without Arms” stars a poet who wears prostheses to write her poems or even to slip a stick of gum from a pack. She’s so imbued with the metallic qualities of her arms that her very being, her mind and sexuality, shade off into metal. Another can—t-miss tale is “Mary Magdalena Versus Godzilla.” Horror fans, do not pass this by. Others should note that this off-offbeat sheaf from a university press has strong literary worth.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-942979-62-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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