None
Rice fans awaiting the finale of 1990's The Witching Hourwill be only temporarily dismayed by the author's fourth bloodletting and the return of the Vampire Lestat—in what is Rice's most strongly plotted novel yet. Lestat first appeared in the cloth-of-purple-velvet Interview With the Vampire(1976), the first modern novel to take up vampirism on a scale of detail whose seriousness sowed the dragon's teeth of imitators. Here, Lestat holds the storyteller's reins and tells of his recent folly in attempting to return to mortality. He despairs of his present 200 years of life, then goes to the Gobi desert to commit suicide by flying into the sun. But death by sunlight is too painful to bear. So when he is approached by Raglen James—a con artist who has been kicked out of the secret psychic organization The Talamasca, good guys with a computerized record of all major evil events caused by nasty spirits, and who has learned the trick of body switching—Lestat is fatally seduced into switching bodies with James for two nights and a day. This is a third of the waffling way into a novel that is slow to set its hook. But once Rice gets to the body switch, she provides her most inspired pages ever. Sweet-smelling, cruel, proud, self-pitying, death-proof, snotty, multimulti-billionaire honcho vampire Lestat finds himself in the tall, handsome body of a man who bears every human frailty, suffers proneness to a killer cold that lands him in the hospital, has mortal fears by the dozen, synapses much slower than Lestat's, sloshy flesh that twists with hunger, always feels leaden, and must descend to the horrid stinks of the toilet. He's robbed blind by James, a great hacker thief, and falls in love with a Catholic nun—while James, on a bloody flying rampage, won't give Lestat his body back. Irresistible as Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin's All of Me.
None NonePub Date: Oct. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40528-3
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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