Poet Louis debuts with a grim contemporary saga from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation (where he teaches at Oglala Lakota College): a story full of brutality and whimsy, though so volatile a mix requires a greater talent than is revealed here. Rudy Yellow Shirt, longtime Pine Ridge policeman, is having a midlife crisis of epic dimensions—one exacerbated by the extreme poverty and degradation among his Oglala people. He's hypertensive, impotent; his wife is ready to leave him; and his job of rounding up winos—among them his brother—and investigating an unending string of murders and fatal accidents gives him no peace. When he hits his head on a rock while chasing rape-and-murder suspects, however, his life begins to change. A mental presence he calls the Avenging Warrior commits him to bursts of vigilante justice, leading him to break the knees of the murderers with a baseball bat and later to burn down a liquor store adjoining the reservation. His sex drive returns, too, but since his wife is already gone, he chases other women, including his cousin's wife. The cousin then conveniently drops dead, leaving nothing between Rudy and his desire, although first he has to put feelings for his soon-to-be- ex-wife behind him—which he does by raping her. Meanwhile, this dubious progress toward domestic harmony is complicated by the decline of older brother Mogie, Vietnam vet and star athlete turned permanent drunk, whom Rudy accidentally set on fire along with the liquor store. Mogie soon walks the spirit road when his liver fails, but not before the brothers are reconciled: at the close, Rudy will put his vengeful nature to rest by fulfilling Mogie's last request—pouring a bucket of red paint down Washington's face on Mount Rushmore. Not a pretty picture of reservation life, but even so the shock effects from both the violence and the humor are severely diluted by tin-eared dialogue and trite phrasing.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-79958-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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