Companion to last year's Psycho-Paths horror anthology, edited as before by the renowned motherstuffer of Psycho. Bloch's editorial chutzpa has collected some top-flight genre writers for this sheaf—most of which is not bad at all and some of which is quite well written. All told, the 17 authors know they're in good company and strive for excellence, though generally the stories featuring thuggish protagonists sink to the dreariest predictability—a thought that means the more intelligent the protagonist, the better the writing. Bloch kicks off with the best- written piece here, ``Snow Man'' by John Coyne, about a bitter Peace Corps teacher in Ethiopia whose students decide to teach him a lesson. Ray Bradbury's genial ``Fee Fie Fo Fum'' tells about the new bone-grinding Garburator in the kitchen sink and features the best opening sentence in the collection: ``The postman came melting along the sidewalk in the hot summer sun, his nose dripping, his fingers wet on his full leather pouch.'' Ramsey Campbell's ``For You To Judge'' tells of a juror on a serial-murder case who takes on the character of the guilty man. Jonathan Carroll's ``The Lick of Time'' finds a young woman being taken over by her own voice on her new high-tech answering machine. Charles L. Grant's ``Name That Tune'' Features a hopeful random-killer-to-be haunted by a tune whose name he can't remember until he's mugged in an alley. In ``It Takes One To Know One,'' editor Bloch cuts rather close to the bone, drawing a group of hack horror writers from the Fifties who form The Skull Club and set up a tontine: the last of them to remain alive wins a 98-cent bottle of Chianti. Though a mechanical revenge story, it's more carefully written than Bloch's embarrassing intro to the volume. Better than you may expect but not memorable.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-85049-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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