Lively fun, though not as stylish as Stoker or Kim Newman.
Simply amazing! First-novelist Kupfer, who teaches film and lit studies largely devoted to horror, has a grandfather . . . well, that’s too involved, but a Kupfer family heirloom exists: a diary written by none other than Bram Stoker’s great vampire hunter, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing.
Which is what Kupfer here presents. It’s nicely illustrated by someone with an unreadable signature (“VH”?) who clearly loves celebrated fantasy artist Virgil Finlay. Professor Van Helsing tells us (back in 1886) that he’s open-minded about folk cures, herbs, fetishes, etc., and so when he hears Hungarian Dr. Radu Borescu lecture about a blood contagion in Transylvania, he decides to accept Borescu’s offer of a visit to darkest Hungary for further folk-learning. Meanwhile, Van Helsing’s wife Rita lies quite pale from this very contagion, though Abraham thinks she’s only mildly ill. No sooner does he arrive at Borescu’s country retreat than a vampire dissolves before him into green muck when it tries to cross running water. Shocking? Well, Van Helsing absorbs this horror rather easily. That evening he himself is attacked by a child vampire and a naked, large-breasted Lamia named Malia, whom the erotically entranced doctor must invite into his room before she can caress and strike her canines into his neck. When Dr. Borescu tries to save Van Helsing, however, Malia does attack and fatally infect Borescu. Then it’s up to a pious Father Dobra and Van Helsing to drive a wooden stake through Borescu’s heart as his crimson eyes mark his full turning and befoulment. Van Helsing vows to fight these creatures, but the train he leaves on is attacked by Malia (who turned Vlad Tepes centuries ago), giant bats, and slavering wolves that leave an abomination of bodies in the compartments. Can things get worse? Yes, indeed, as Van Helsing finds when his seemingly recovered wife wastes and falls into crimson-eyed delirium. Will Rita need . . . the stake?
Lively fun, though not as stylish as Stoker or Kim Newman.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31011-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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