Agreeably terrifying and all quite believable.
Two brilliant dot.coms and their retinue steam up Brazil’s Rio Negro into a world without broadband or pity and learn more than they expected about their place in the scheme of things.
With its unnecessary subtitle, Pyper’s follow-up to Lost Girls (2000) is plenty spooky. Elizabeth Crossman, lonely, Canadian, 38, and susceptible, narrates the increasingly terrifying journey of fellow Canadian software developer/floggers Wallace and Bates, childhood chums who’ve taken their show on the road seeking buyers for HYPOTHESYS, the hot new solution to pesky problems of ethics. The boys, accompanied by their token adult Barry, an Ivy Leaguer from the American South; Lydia, a Brit hoping to get pregnant, and Crossman, take a night away from their governmental trade mission keepers and head to the dives of Manaus, the boom-and-bust entry-point to Amazonia. Following the recommendation of their hotel’s gigantic and ominous concierge, the ever drunker party winds up in a bordello where Bates learns that he may not be gay and where the legend of personal greatness he dreams up to impress his whore starts machinery moving that will grind up lives. The next day’s side-trip up the Rio Negro turns terrifying in the middle of the night—and the rainforest—when a gang of Spanish-speaking thugs, possibly Colombian, tumble over the gunwales, murder the crew, and separate the Canadians from the rest of the party to march them through the vines, snakes, and swarming insects to a hidden camp where they’re tortured for the “secrets” suggested by the boozy myth that Bates poured into the ear of the hooker who supposedly spoke no English. Only Crossman is spared the beatings, burnings, and brainbusting, but when the group escapes, it’s the brilliant, beautiful, mercurial, and machete-wielding Wallace who gets them out. Crossman can simply follow, mulling over various fates and her moony feelings for the charismatic software boy.
Agreeably terrifying and all quite believable.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3422-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
IN THE NEWS
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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