Spank you very much, Ramsey.
Reprint of Campbell’s 1987 Scared Stiff: Tales of Seduction and Terror (1987) that keeps the Clive Barker introduction and has three new stories and an afterword by Campbell (Pact of the Fathers, 2001, etc.). The original illustrations are gone.
With plenty of meat about his start as a writer, Campbell’s afterword gives the background about the seven earlier stories here—which, back in the late ’60s and ’70s, were meant to be groundbreaking works in the horror genre. Among them, “The Doll” tells of a coven that meets for orgies and for placing curses on a devil doll that attracts the devil himself into the orgy, a huge figure with curling horns and a monstrous penis. So the curses work—but is this really the devil? Campbell’s urge for variety has him feature different pervy modes in each of the new tales as well. In the rather dreary and fogbound “The Limits of Fantasy,” a dirty-picture photographer for a men’s spanker magazine sneaks pictures through the frosted glass of her bathroom window of a beautiful blond neighbor and then finds that his spanky fantasies about the pictures have painful real-life effects. No power of fantasy can force glowing interest into that sow’s ear from Monogram Pictures. In “The Body in the Window,” a British councilman tours the Amsterdam red-light district and sex shops, looking for the worst he can find, to report to the council, and to his wife, to justify his trip. This turns out to be a bony girl his daughter’s age, manacled naked to a wheel. When he tries to free her with pliers, she seduces him on the turning wheel and he finds that—well, a surprise. The most charming of Campbell’s cryptic kisses is “Kill Me Hideously,” about horrorwriter Willy Bantam. He’s begged repeatedly by a nutcase—who loves his goriest books—to put her in his next book. So he does—but she’s a terrible mess before he’s through.
Spank you very much, Ramsey.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30004-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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