Robotic nanocells!! Taking over!! Definitely bad news.
Really, really, really, really gruesome and Shirleyesque.
Shirley is a philosophe/fantaste of the Grand Guignol school who reinvents hell in work after work, seemingly for a fanbase of the kind of kid who loves slasher movies—films that come nowhere near the grue that Shirley can squeeze from flesh (The View from Hell, 2001, we called “worst novel of the year,” and 2002’s Demons we called “masterful, amusing, and sent from Mars”). Crawlers is the musings of a technocrank, and we open at the government’s three-walls-thick secret nanotechnology lab, where molecular machines have gone berserk and let cells loose that dismember humans and use human arms and legs and heads and torsos to crawl about independently of each other and perform further dismemberments. Three years later, a US satellite module crashes into a lake near Quiebra, California (Quiebra, we are told, means “queer-bait”). Two teenagers, Waylon Kulick and Adair Leverton, observe the crash. Adair’s brother Cal alerts their father, who runs Leverton Salvage, and he goes down to salvage the sunken module. It has a crack, and when Dad sticks his fingers into the crack, there’s an answering touch and tingle. Then the module is hauled aloft as the reader squirms: Don’t open it! Soon, naked crawlers show up in a cemetery—bodies that have metal extensions seemingly to help them crawl out of their graves and join in groupthink mental transference. Pets start dying, killed violently. Squirrels have long metal tongues, blue jays metal feet, and they don’t run or fly, they roll. People start turning into weird machines with huge mouths, turning other people into weird machines. Sure, it’s California—but this could get outta hand. What if it goes online, like a virus, or zaps you from your telephone—or even from the television! Omigod, these long silver strands leap into your mouth and turn you. Horrible!
Robotic nanocells!! Taking over!! Definitely bad news.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-44652-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
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
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