Not enough unique here to leave a mark on a horror fan’s imagination.
Kirch offers an unusual twist on the overdone vampire mythos in this simplistic supernatural thriller.
For the creature at the center of his paranormal tale, Kirch wisely uses a variation on vampires, the Filipino aswang. Anton Gerrold was thought dead from a stake in the heart after a series of gruesome murders in Phoenix in 1991. But—oops—the authorities missed his tiny heart. So now Gerrold has returned to terrorize women in Los Angeles more than 20 years later. And he makes a horrific monster: “There was a scent to pregnant women that the vampire found irresistible….Nothing was more fantastic than unborn flesh being ripped between his teeth.” Capt. Darren Matheson, a veteran homicide detective, gets sucked into a world he doesn’t understand while investigating these bizarre attacks. The FBI agent who thought Gerrold had been destroyed sends Matheson to retrieve his former helper, disgraced reporter Sebastian Hemlock, from Kansas City, where he was resigned to working for a tabloid newspaper. Hemlock grabs this chance to get the job done right while redeeming his reputation and maybe rekindling his love with Karon Ramiko. “The FBI made him destroy my life as a means of controlling me and what I know: that there are indeed monsters in this world,” Hemlock says. While Kirch’s original concept is intriguing and he provides a diverting governmental-coverup subplot, this short narrative falls together far too neatly. Too quickly, Matheson, Hemlock and his ex-girlfriend Lt. Karon Ramiko have located Gerrold’s hideout and marched off on their mission to slay the beast, without enough time to build suspense. There’s little space dedicated to fleshing out these cardboard characters, either. Instead, it’s the steady cop and the bickering couple, who are still in love, that team up to save the day. The intriguing concept is wasted on a predictable narrative, adding little that’s new to the genre.
Not enough unique here to leave a mark on a horror fan’s imagination.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1771151955
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Double Dragon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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