A predominantly traditional ghost story, with enough apparitions to unnerve readers.
A man may prefer the raging snowstorm outside when his refuge turns out to be a mansion that could very well be haunted in this debut supernatural tale.
Adem’s looking forward to a Christmas-weekend visit with his cousin Alp in Boulder, Colorado. The traveler gets a head start to stay in front of the forecasted blizzard but is unfortunately sidetracked by attractive diner waitress Felda. Her offer of a night together is too much for 23-year-old virgin Adem to pass up, delaying his anticipated arrival in Boulder until the following day. He’s barely on the road again when his Impala skids into the forest, the ensuing accident leaving him injured with a crashed car and crushed phone. Luckily, Adem finds a mansion and butler Vladimir Barkov saves him before he dies of frostbite, hunger, or bear-mauling. Wadim, master of the house, certainly appears inviting, and gives Adem access to hearty meals, courtesy of a personal chef, as well as an inside pool. Then things get weird, starting with someone creeping into his room in the early morning hours. Soon he’s witnessing ghostly figures walking through doors or shouting vague, ominous threats—“You’re next!” The snow eases up, but a mass murderer on the loose results in a police lockdown in Boulder. Now Adem’s a virtual prisoner and apparently the only person able to see the ever-menacing ghouls. There’s a good amount of recognizable characteristics in Baig’s ghost story, from a message written in a foggy mirror to the sound of footsteps coming closer. The author makes them work in sheer abundance, with Adem relentlessly tormented by eerie individuals (sporting bloody-red eyes, for one) who inexplicably vanish. Recurring images set an ambivalent mood, like a candle holder rolling toward Adem or people heading into the “forbidden hallway,” signifying the house’s mysterious, off-limits left wing. Dialogue, however, is occasionally repetitive, with four different characters, for example, using the phrase “No worries.” Initially selfish, the protagonist at least feels guilty about choosing sex over his cousin, while the narrative provides sufficient resolution for all subplots, including Alp and the newfound romance between Adem and maid Maria.
A predominantly traditional ghost story, with enough apparitions to unnerve readers.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4602-7103-2
Page Count: 168
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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