A nasty, freaky, and haphazardly funny horror story.
A punk-rock vagabond circa 1977 and a struggling Hollywood stuntwoman circa 2013 find themselves connected through a grotesque paranormal underground society.
Whatever those guys are smoking over at Cracked.com is working—this is the fourth good novel from a contributor, following David Wong’s John Dies at the End (2009) and This Book Is Full of Spiders (2012) as well as Wayne Gladstone’s Notes From the Internet Apocalypse (2014). Brockway (Rx: A Tale of Electronegativity, 2013, etc.) takes a less flippant approach to his over-the-top horror show, but humor and verve still bleed through in the voices of his vibrant lead characters. We meet Carey Horton in the beating heart of Manhattan’s punk scene as he and his friends get smashed, thrash their way through concerts, and revel in their squalid DIY existence. But dark forces are awakening in the form of “unnoticeables,” or “empty ones,” which are human shells that now house something…else. “You look for humanity in human-shaped things, and when you don’t find it, your broken, clouded minds just glaze right over it,” one of them tells Carey. “We are like you, but missing your inefficiencies.” He also encounters “tar men,” which are Lovecraft-ian monstrosities with acidic, flammable goo spread over mechanical skeletons. The book leaps between Carey’s youth and the present day, in which we meet Kaitlyn Barr, a cocktail waitress who yearns to become a professional Hollywood stuntwoman. She’s also begun seeing angels, which is making her doubt her sanity. At a party one night, she meets former child star Marco Luis (a thinly veiled doppelgänger of Mario Lopez from Saved by the Bell, which is funny all by itself). When Marco forces a kiss on Kaitlyn, she feels something cold, metallic, and distinctly inhuman slither inside her. Who should rescue her but an aged, alcoholic, and homeless Carey? There’s a lot of cosmic mythology in between about blood rituals and the origins of these surreal angels and demons, but readers will enjoy themselves more if they just kick back and enjoy the wild ride.
A nasty, freaky, and haphazardly funny horror story.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7966-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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