In showing what it’s really like on a cold night when God and Santa Claus are both watching, Phillips provides the perfect...
One thing’s for sure: This tale of a halfhearted embezzler struggling to escape from town (Wichita, Kansas) with his ill-gotten gains is not your average Christmas Eve story.
Charlie Arglist is a man of many talents. He used to practice law. He can still duck a speeding ticket without half trying. He has an eye for the ladies, and for strippers who don’t pretend to be ladies. And he runs the odd errand for Vic Cavanaugh, who’s been cooking the books on the operations he shares with Bill Gerard. Now that snow is blanketing the countryside, and joints like Tease-O-Rama and the Sweet Cage are empty except for customers scurrying home from Midnight Mass, Charlie plans to rendezvous with Vic and take off—just as soon as he’s made his last rounds of his old haunts, doling out holiday tips to Dusti, Francie, and Cupcake, leaving an indiscreet photo as an unsought Christmas gift to Sweet Cage manager Renata, and taking one last peek at the children who have no idea he’s leaving. Gradually, though, Charlie’s plans start to unravel. His brother-in-law ruins his getaway car. Vic isn’t waiting for Charlie at his house. Enforcers are on his trail. The weather is getting worse and worse. And that’s all before people start killing each other, with Charlie, sleepwalking through his abortive escape plans, watching numbly as the corpses pile up around him. First-timer Phillips, batting Charlie like a pinball from one flipper to the next and back again, commands a gorgeous array of tones from ribald comedy to sad-sack pathos to breathtakingly abrupt brutality, producing the shaggiest caper you’ve ever read.
In showing what it’s really like on a cold night when God and Santa Claus are both watching, Phillips provides the perfect corrective to all those treacly seasonal fables that get left under Christmas trees by the gross.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-44018-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out...
A post-apocalyptic novel in which Hig, who only goes by this mononym, finds not only survival, but also the possibility of love.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the catastrophe that has turned the world into its cataclysmic state remains unnamed, but it involves “The Blood,” a highly virulent and contagious disease that has drastically reduced the population and has turned most of the remaining survivors into grim hangers-on, fiercely protective of their limited territory. Hig lives in an abandoned airplane hangar and keeps a 1956 Cessna, which he periodically takes out to survey the harsh and formidable landscape. While on rare occasions he spots a few Mennonites, fear of “The Blood” generally keeps people at more than arm’s length. Hig has established a defensive perimeter by a large berm, competently guarded by Bangley, a terrifying friend but exactly the kind of guy you want on your side, since he can pot intruders from hundreds of yards away, and he has plenty of firepower to do it. Haunted by a voice he heard faintly on the radio, Hig takes off one day in search of fellow survivors and comes across Pops and Cima, a father and daughter who are barely eking out a living off the land by gardening and tending a few emaciated sheep. Like Bangley, Pops is laconic and doesn’t yield much, but Hig understandably finds himself attracted to Cima, the only woman for hundreds of miles and a replacement for the ache Hig feels in having lost his pregnant wife, Melissa, years before.
Although Heller creates with chilling efficiency the bleakness of a world largely bereft of life as we know it, he holds out some hope that human relationships can be redemptive.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95994-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
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