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GHOST OF CHANCE

Name: GHOST OF CHANCE
Author: William S. Burroughs
ISBN: 1-85242-406-0

by William S. Burroughs ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995

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From the strange and venerable Burroughs, a tiny slip of a book (to include 17 illustrations by the author) that becomes a cri de coeur for ecological sanity. In his spare, comic-hook style, Burroughs opens by telling—or telegraphing—the story of one Captain Mission who, in the 18th century, founded a "free pirate settlement, Libertatia, on the west coast of Madagascar." The settlement's self-imposed laws forbade harming the lemurs that dwelled on the island—although these kind and sensitive creatures ("lemur" meant "ghost" in the native tongue), needless to say, were to face calamitous treatment anyhow, by marauders from within and without—as was the mysterious stone temple that Captain Mission had discovered, known by him to be "the entrance to the biological Garden of lost Chances." When the temple is destroyed, and with it the lemurs' opportunity of developing into a yet more sensitive and wondrous species, "Mission knows that a chance that occurs only once in a hundred sixty million years has been lost forever." "Beauty is always doomed," writes Burroughs, placing the blame flatly on "Homo Sap with his weapons,...his insatiable greed, and ignorance so hideous it can never see its own face." And thus—for the balance of the book—is unleashed the formidable power of Burroughs the essayist of conscience, agony, and vitriol: chronicling Homo Sap's ravaging of other species ("The humans belch out the last passenger pigeon"), self-deluding opportunism and greed (including "the Christ Sickness" and the "war against drugs"), and the species' folly-laden susceptibility to certain revenge through increasingly vile, unimaginable new diseases and viruses, their effects described in ways calculated to chill the very blood of "Homo Sap, the Ugly Animal." Burroughs, in all, as the high lyric poet of wretched lost hopes. Or maybe not wholly lost: At book's end is an address, with an appeal for funds to help save the lemurs.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-85242-406-0

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Serpent’s Tail

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS' "THE REVISED BOY SCOUT MANUAL"
by William S. Burroughs edited by Geoffrey D. Smith John M. Bennett

- BOOK REVIEW
RUB OUT THE WORDS
by William S. Burroughs edited by Bill Morgan

- BOOK REVIEW
AND THE HIPPOS WERE BOILED IN THEIR TANKS
by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac

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THE SHINING

by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 1976

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A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).

The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....

Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976

ISBN: 0385121679

Page Count: 453

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
NEVER FLINCH
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
YOU LIKE IT DARKER
by Stephen King

- BOOK REVIEW
HOLLY
by Stephen King

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Carrie Turns 40

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.