A sometimes-engaging horror story with a familiar, predictable conclusion.
Three 20-somethings’ holiday in Bulgaria becomes a vacation from hell in Dash’s (The Evil and the Pure, 2014) horror novel.
Dominic and his best friend, Curran, are easy travelers to please—get them drunk and they’re happy. Martini, Dominic’s girlfriend, has tolerated their behavior long enough and wants more from her holiday experience. Taking control of the itinerary, she surprises the boys with a culture- and nature-filled road trip through Bulgaria. Martini’s excitement about the trip isn’t reciprocated, however. From the outset, the trio’s obvious lack of chemistry is grating, which is only exacerbated by the tired roles they inhabit: nagging girlfriend; combative, crude best friend; and apathetic boyfriend. With each new town they visit, Martini and Dominic’s relationship inches toward demise, mostly because of Curran and his insatiable attraction to the bar scene. Lurking in the Bulgarian shadows, however, is a far greater, more intriguing threat. When Dominic and Curran ditch Martini (yet again) to hang out with a group of local teenagers, the night leads them to a secret lake in the woods where copious drinking, skinny-dipping, and flirtation abound. That is, until Dominic and Curran are beaten and left naked after Curran flirts with the wrong girl. When Dominic wakes the next afternoon, he’s badly sunburned and alone—and then, at his weakest moment, a lurking beast arrives. Dominic’s ensuing struggle to find his friend, stay alive, and defeat the creature is vivid and unrelenting, and Dash fully realizes the unnamed monster in all of its grotesque, imposing physicality. During this section, the novel offers captivating tension and brutal, gory fun. If only it ended there, because after the exhilarating hide-and-seek contest between man and beast, the rest of the story feels flat and contrived. It isn’t helped by references to the silliness of horror-movie archetypes, which only weaken the horror tropes littered throughout the story.
A sometimes-engaging horror story with a familiar, predictable conclusion.Pub Date: April 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511568807
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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PERSPECTIVES
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