A brisk, accomplished horror debut from an author to watch.
In Drago’s debut novel, an insidious horror reveals itself in a small North Carolina town.
The town of Crow Creek is experiencing two tragedies: In the dramatic foreground, a massive sinkhole has suddenly opened up on King Street, swallowing cars and businesses and very nearly some citizens; in the background, the town has seen an inordinate number of inexplicable suicides in recent years. The sinkhole, which naturally takes precedence, opens underneath the normal day-to-day lives of a well-drawn cast of characters, including loutish Stan “Krully” Krulikowski, a branch manager at Crow Creek Savings; and Sheriff Brad Gleason, who’s taking care of his father, the previous sheriff. (Drago writes of the old man’s decline into senility with memorable sensitivity.) Gleason is the kind of guy that others turn to in times of crisis, but his young daughter Maddie was one of the town’s suicides two years ago (“She drove up to Ninth Street on lunch break one afternoon, waited for a Southern Railways freight car, and ended her life. Plain and simple. Left her keys in the ignition with the car running”), and he’s as puzzled as everyone else in town about what’s driving so many people to take their own lives. Those deaths are regularly commemorated by the town’s enigmatic cleric, Pastor Aken, and Drago develops Aken’s darkness so skillfully that by the time readers actually meet the pastor in person, it’s no surprise that he’s the villain of the story. As Sheriff Gleason agonizes over hearing the disembodied voice of his dead daughter, the author grippingly weaves issues of faith and the afterlife into his bubbling plot. Drago’s major literary influence is fairly obvious; the small town of quirky locals, the dogged teamwork amid adversity, and the compelling, central figure of evil are very much Stephen King’s territory. However, Drago navigates this terrain with considerable skill and a good ear for dialogue and deadpan humor.
A brisk, accomplished horror debut from an author to watch.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615982663
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Gold Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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