Sequel to Spruill's Rulers of Darkness (1995), a fresh medical suspense/horror novel and the start of a new series about hemophages (bloodeaters) in the District of Columbia. Again, Spruill gives himself a hospital setting to work with- -though the various medical analyses of vampire blood and other occult arcana, touched on in that earlier novel, are unsurprising. Nor does the plot leap forward as electrically as in Rulers. With historical background no longer new, the story focuses now on a 500-year-old hemophage's revenge on his father, himself a thousand-year-old bloodeater. Ten years have passed since the action in Rulers. D.C. homicide detective Merrick Chapman has retired, having married hematologist Katie O'Keefe and fathered a nonhemophagic son with her. Several hundred years before, Merrick turned on his kind and began locking fellow vampires up in vaults from which they could not escape and in which they eventually starved to death. To help locate bloodthirsty hemophages, who disguise their trails, Merrick turned to law enforcement and became adept at picking out vampiric victims from other homicides. His greatest enemy now is his son Zane, who refuses to be turned from vampirism. Ten years ago, Merrick confined Zane in an escape-proof vault, where he should have died after two years without feeding. But in some mysterious manner Zane has now escaped and is out to return his daughter, Jenny Hrluska, to the bloodlust natural to her. Jenny, however, now 22 and the youngest intern ever at Adams Memorial, wants to save lives, not take them. She sides with her grandfather Merrick, who hopes to die a normal death along with his wife Katie (he has watched 16 wives and 43 children grow old and die). But then Zane commits a murder attributed to Jenny, trying to force her back into the fold and to lure his father to his destruction. Less energy and richly layered excitement than before, but still notable in its field.
Pub Date: June 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48432-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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