England's prolific Masterton (Flights of Fear, 1996, etc.) begins a new horror series featuring Jim Rook, a California psychic who teaches a remedial class in a San Fernando Valley high school. A bout of pneumonia that nearly killed him as a child has granted Rook psychic insight, though he doesn't realize it. One morning he interrupts a bloody battle in the boys' room between Tee Jay Jones and Elvin P. Clay. Then Rook discovers Elvin's body in a boiler room, with 112 stab wounds. Tee Jay is arrested, but Rook sees a black-suited man flitting about the halls and at the scene of the murder—though no one else can see this figure. Jim's palm-reading neighbor, Mrs. Vaizey, tries to awaken him to his greater psychic abilities, which Jim denies. Meanwhile, he leads his class through On the Road. Then the shadow man, a.k.a. The Smoke, approaches Jim and tells him that he needs his help. Jim is sure that Tee Jay's Uncle Umber, a follower of voodoo, is Elvin's murderer, and that The Smoke is somehow connected to Umber. When Mrs. Vaizey goes out-of-body to help Jim by infiltrating Uncle Umber's apartment, Jim watches in horror as she is killed in a particularly gruesome manner. The Smoke also begins appearing in Jim's classroom; at first only Jim and Tee Jay can see him, although the other kids eventually also become aware of him. Uncle Umber wants Jim to act as his messenger to a leading drug dealer and to tell him that he wants 90 percent of the dealer's take on every shipment. The Smoke, it turns out, is Umber's uncanny henchman. In the end, only Jim and his students can stand up to The Smoke, by robbing Uncle Umber of the voodoo stick that focuses his power. A sympathetic, poetry-reading hero provides Masterton with many better-than-average pages.
Pub Date: April 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-7278-4991-3
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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
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
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