Top-drawer.
Original stories from a dark place, as collected by Datlow, who, with Terri Windling, edits The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections.
The 16 here, about half by well-knowns and half by fresh voices, are meant to scare your pants off. That, of course, is unlikely, since fright hangs on surprise and if you know ahead. . . . Best foot forward is Jeffrey Ford’s utterly beautiful “The Trentino Kid,” which anchors its ghost in a close study of clamming in Great South Bay. If it weren’t for the occasional slippery-slimy body floating by, you’d want to get out and start clamming yourself. Joyce Carol Oates’s “Subway” is about a destiny-hungering woman with panting crimson lips and glistening mascara-ed eyes caught up in a recurring death-cycle on the subway. Gahan Wilson’s “The Dead Ghost” tells of a person waking up immobile in a hospital bed after an explosion to discover a fat, weighty, jellylike see-through body on the bed beside him and having to push his only moveable hand through the globby muck (it exhales corpse-stink) to get to the emergency button. Kathe Koja’s “Velocity” presents a sculptor whose current specialty is driving bicycles into trees. He’s the son of a vile artist, whom he calls the Prince of Darkness, who apparently burned his wife alive and later suicided by driving into a tree. Now his son is sure that Dad is crawling about the pipes of the Red House, which the son has inherited: he’s afraid to sit on the toilet and allow Dad to crawl up inside him. Ramsey Campbell’s “Feeling Remains” offers his usual marvel of domestic satire with acidic commentary on feminist strong-arming and the failed attempt to rein in a changeling who wants to burn down a house. Also on hand: Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, Terry Dowling, Jack Cady, Lucius Shepard, Kelly Link, Glen Hirshberg, Daniel Abraham, Stephen Gallagher, and Mike O’Driscoll.
Top-drawer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-765-30444-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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