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VICTIMS

Name: VICTIMS
Author: Travis Jeppesen
ISBN: 1-888451-42-4

by Travis Jeppesen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2003

Overwrought and underthought: an American gothic that could have used a few more drafts.

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First novel with a bevy of psychopaths and a millennial cult called The Overcomers.

As the initial title in Akashic’s new Little House on the Bowery series, edited by Dennis Cooper, this is far from groundbreaking, and in fact barely manages to even keep interest. Jeppsen starts with a teenage girl, Tanya, who’s on the fast track to teenage wasteland. Pregnant, perpetually stoned, and suffering all the usual torments inflicted on children by clichéd redneck parents in this kind of tale, Tanya runs away. On the road and drifting, she soon enough finds herself listening to the very convincing Martin Jones talk about why he and his followers are getting ready for “The Next Evolutionary Level of Existence.” This preparation, of course, involves shaving one’s head, wearing a lot of white, forgoing sex, waiting for the flying saucers, and listening with rapt, blissful attention to everything Martin has to say. Mixed in with Tanya’s story is that of Herbert, who appears to be her teenaged son, born while she was at the cult and later cut loose upon the world as a grab-bag of self-destructive, deluded impulses. This takes a while to become clear, of course, because not only are Herbert’s tale and Tanya’s interwoven, but tossed in among them are the scrambled fever-dreams of other crazed individuals, some associated with the cult (or so it seems). This whole loosely organized flotilla of sketches sails, as it were, into oblivion. A better writer might have pulled off such a feat, but Jeppesen’s characters offer difficulty through being insufficiently distinguished one from another, while his prose tends toward the simply careless, occasionally turning up the especially embarrassing turn of phrase (“Biscuits of emotion”). Such weaknesses conspire to keep what might have been an interesting examination of the psychology of millennial cults a tedious piece of work.

Overwrought and underthought: an American gothic that could have used a few more drafts.

Pub Date: May 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-888451-42-4

Page Count: 184

Publisher: Akashic

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

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A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.