A dark and disturbing foray into voodoo-terror by a master of the religious-conspiracy thriller (The Brotherhood of the Tomb, 1990; The Ninth Buddha, 1989, etc.). From the opening pages, in which Haitian-born heroine Angelina Hammel finds a host of corpses hidden beneath the floorboards of her Brooklyn apartment, Easterman spins a morbid tale of unrelenting evil that's a far and eerie cry from the high adventure of his earlier work. In sinuous prose tinged with despair, the horrors pile up: one body is trapped in a living death—a zombi?; Angelina's ethnologist husband, Rick, is found murdered and mutilated in a nearby park; Reuben Abrams, the cop assigned to Angelina, uncovers a weird sanctum of evil beneath the Brooklyn waterfront, full of spiders, more bodies, the mummy of a sorcerer, and half of a golden disc. This disc, Abrams learns, is the talisman of the Seventh Order, a reactionary, voodoo-based global conspiracy that includes ``senators, judges, industrialists,'' and that prophesies ``the resurrection of all things when the true king'' sits on his voodoo throne. Members of the Order soon give violent chase to Angelina, whom they rightly believe holds information—derived from her husband's research—threatening to the Order. The brutal murder of Abrams's parents (partly repaid by the cop with a syringe through the assassin's eyeball) is only one atrocity of many as the duo, aided by a secret federal anti-Order cabal, fend off attack. Prompted by the cabal, Abrams and Angelina, now uneasy lovers, fly to the Order's homeground, Haiti—where the action turns darker still, a febrile shock-scape of voodoo ceremonies, torture, and death (and one whiff of Easterman past—an extraneous but rousing escapade during a hurricane) that ends in the bleakest possible way. More horror novel than thriller, grim and unforgiving, and resonant with menace, decay, and the stuff nightmares are made of.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-017928-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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