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
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
PERSPECTIVES
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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