Blood and thunder along with scantily clad female victims, monsters of every stripe, and more blood.
Don’t have time to wade through all five volumes collecting the stories of pulpmeister Quinn (1889-1969) published in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1951? Editor George Vanderburgh has obligingly selected 20 standouts.
“Standout” doesn’t mean “best.” Self-described “physician and occultist” Dr. Jules de Grandin is roused from his rarely glimpsed domestic sphere in Harrisonville, New Jersey, by an unending parade of cases that end up involving ghouls, vampires, werewolves, mummies, familiars, reincarnated figures from past history, and the undead. So every one of these stories is very much like all the others. Even many of their titles—“The House of Horror,” “Restless Souls,” “Stealthy Death,” “The Mansion of Unholy Magic,” “Witch-House,” “Suicide Chapel”—are interchangeable. Yet they all stand out from the everyday world in the starkest terms possible. Grandin and his stodgier sidekick, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, confront bridegrooms who drop dead at the altar, horribly vengeful surgeons, sinister kittens, fathers eager to sacrifice their children in the name of science, and plot twists that echo “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” The Moonstone and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (and, to be fair, others that anticipate “The Most Dangerous Game” and Jamaica Inn). National and ethnic stereotypes take the place of characterization, and both the malefactors and their victims are largely indistinguishable from others in their class. Quinn’s zeal is reserved for pulpy plotting. He launches each tale with a juicy hook, breaks as many taboos (from dismemberment to incest) as possible, and keeps the pot boiling en route to the inevitably anticlimactic explanations, face-offs, and post-combat libations.
Blood and thunder along with scantily clad female victims, monsters of every stripe, and more blood.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949102-26-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Night Shade
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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