With a little nip in the night, Anne’s fangs offer us the Dark Gift.
The Vampire Chronicles Annual Rice Report on vampirism in Louisiana (Blood and Gold, 2001, etc.) finds Queen Anne’s tiara firmly in place for a sweeping plot.
Lestat and his new protégé, Tarquin “Quinn” Blackwood, 22, six feet four, fly over clouds, then feast luridly on a pair of heroin-addicted whores who’ve murdered for money. As Lestat says, drinking the blood of evildoers, sucking their sins and lives into one’s own blood, lends vampires a certain usefulness, though not humanity. Lestat has a fresh problem: the good, gray, ever namby-pamby scholars of the Talamasca have issued a Declaration of Enmity against him, which he wants rescinded. Quinn’s problem is that since earliest childhood he’s been hounded by a doppelgänger named Goblin who grows only stronger as Quinn ages and sucks out tastes of Quinn’s blood after Quinn feasts. Quinn lives with Aunt Queen at Blackwood Manor, deep in Sugar Devil Swamp. His Maker turned him only two years ago, and now the novice bloodsucker seeks Lestat for help with monstrous, supervampiric Goblin (Lestat can’t see Goblin, only the floating droplets of blood Goblin has drunk). Quinn is the bastard of Patsy Blackwood, a wannabe country-western singer, who conceived him at 16, father unknown. Now, the incorrigible Goblin keeps the child Quinn from attending school. For many years Quinn has young Lynelle as his teacher—until she dies in a road accident, Goblin crazed by her loss. At18, Quinn, who thinks he may be queer, finds himself having sex with an attic ghost named Rebecca. And the house has other ghosts as well. He later falls for red-haired, star-crossed Mona of The Mayfair Witches, famous from the earlier novel for sleeping with all her cousins, and now with Quinn. Then an androgynous telepathic stranger demands that Quinn refurbish the Hermitage in the swamp, after which he meets Arion and Petronia, who—but let’s not give that away.
With a little nip in the night, Anne’s fangs offer us the Dark Gift.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41199-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.
Things are about to get bloody for a group of Charleston housewives.
In 1988, the scariest thing in former nurse Patricia Campbell’s life is showing up to book club, since she hasn’t read the book. It’s hard to get any reading done between raising two kids, Blue and Korey, picking up after her husband, Carter, a psychiatrist, and taking care of her live-in mother-in-law, Miss Mary, who seems to have dementia. It doesn’t help that the books chosen by the Literary Guild of Mt. Pleasant are just plain boring. But when fellow book-club member Kitty gives Patricia a gloriously trashy true-crime novel, Patricia is instantly hooked, and soon she’s attending a very different kind of book club with Kitty and her friends Grace, Slick, and Maryellen. She has a full plate at home, but Patricia values her new friendships and still longs for a bit of excitement. When James Harris moves in down the street, the women are intrigued. Who is this handsome night owl, and why does Miss Mary insist that she knows him? A series of horrific events stretches Patricia’s nerves and her Southern civility to the breaking point. (A skin-crawling scene involving a horde of rats is a standout.) She just knows James is up to no good, but getting anyone to believe her is a Sisyphean feat. After all, she’s just a housewife. Hendrix juxtaposes the hypnotic mundanity of suburbia (which has a few dark underpinnings of its own) against an insidious evil that has taken root in Patricia’s insular neighborhood. It’s gratifying to see her grow from someone who apologizes for apologizing to a fiercely brave woman determined to do the right thing—hopefully with the help of her friends. Hendrix (We Sold Our Souls, 2018, etc.) cleverly sprinkles in nods to well-established vampire lore, and the fact that he’s a master at conjuring heady 1990s nostalgia is just the icing on what is his best book yet.
Fans of smart horror will sink their teeth into this one.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68369-143-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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