As ever, the finest horror collection going, with no leaning on hackwork.
Horrormeister Jones defends his collections against Internet carpings that he favors British writers in his horror annual. While two thirds of the present one is British, that’s not the usual balance. And much British material was first published in the US, while other stuff was taken from e-books and small press publications.
The 72-page introduction is astounding, a survey of the horror field for the past year that covers every nook and cranny, from George Lucas’s $400 million earnings to Stephen King’s e-book flop with The Plant to his new $40 million three-book contract with Simon & Schuster, and $65 million earnings, to J. K. Rowlings’s $42 million rake in and the failed plagiarism suit against her. Jones goes deep underground as well, assisted by Kim Newman, in rounding up the dead for the collection’s 40-page annual necrology: farewell Curt Siodmak (age 98), scripter of Universal’s The Wolf Man and dozens of other horror flicks, goodbye Robert Cormier and L. Sprague de Camp, adieu John Gielgud of Frankenstein: The True Story, and a deep bow to stage actor/director Stuart Lancaster (Batman Returns, as well as the lead in Hamlet for a Little Theatre production in which the present reviewer played Bernardo 45 years ago). Top choices herein include two excerpts from Kim Newman’s coming fourth Anno Dracula volume, Johnny Alucard, a film noir piece. In “Castle in the Desert,” a detective meets a 550-year-old lady vampire who tells him about Noah Cross (the John Huston character in Chinatown) moving all the stones of Manderley to the desert in 1920, while in Newman’s “The Other Side of Midnight,” a hymn to Orson Welles and his unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind,” Welles is filming the last days of Dracula, with John Huston as the lead. Also on hand: Thomas Ligotti, Ramsey Campbell, Kathe Koja.
As ever, the finest horror collection going, with no leaning on hackwork.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0919-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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