Effective for readers who appreciate supernatural gore, but the timeline becomes hard to track.
In this debut horror novel, several generations of women try to prevent a demon from opening a permanent rift between universes.
In vignettes that skip ahead and backward in time, this tale follows the efforts of women in a family to sabotage a demon. Bernie Baker, as he’s usually referred to, takes several identities as he steals bodies to reincarnate. He commits cruel acts wherever he goes, at one point becoming known as the “Cleveland Crusher,” a serial killer who murders with a vise. He’s sometimes helped by the “Others,” supernatural creatures that take the guise of ordinary people. In 2004, Bernie is now retired U.S. senator and multimillionaire John Arnold, who has used his wealth and position to push forward a big shopping mall in Redhill, Ohio. The mall stands on the site where the barrier between worlds is thin, a location that previously housed a cabin, then an orphanage, and eventually a correctional facility, where Bernie had lived and later been incarcerated. These structures were destroyed, and now Bernie plans a deadly conflagration in the service of a Great Offering: opening a rift for demons and richly rewarding himself. To do so, he needs the psychic abilities of Madonna Bedonne, the latest in a line of women since 1898 who have fought but failed to stop the demon. But if Madonna can harness her powers, she can close the rift forever and save Redhill’s Christmas shoppers. Readers with a taste for gory horror are the best audience for Noble’s novel. Many scenes detail Bernie’s atrocities at length, the more shocking when committed in the body of a child. But with frequent and wrenching jumps backward and forward in time, for example from 1895 to 2004 to 1885 to 1900 to 1894 in the first 19 pages, it’s difficult to keep a handle on the characters or their roles in the plot. (A chart of relationships provides some help.) Things improve late in the book, when the story settles down to focus on Madonna and her circle of friends, who bravely face up to evil.
Effective for readers who appreciate supernatural gore, but the timeline becomes hard to track.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60303-999-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Plain Label Books
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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