The second entry in a new series of short vampire fabulisms began with Rice’s well-received Pandora (1998), set in ancient Rome. Now Rice’s charm-weaving about bloodsuckers moves up to Italy’s Age of Gold. As ever with her historicals, including Servant of the Bones (1996), Rice seems at her most thoughtful when blending research into neatly melodic paragraphs. Here, the action debuts five hundred years ago in the Florence of the Medicis. Young Vittorio, son of an incalculably wealthy father, lives in a mountaintop castle built on formerly Etruscan land (its graves predate Christ) and is trained for the knighthood at age 13. When demons invade the castle and kill all the adults (and steal all the children), Vittorio fights the demon Ursula and cuts off her arm, which she sticks right back on, while another demon beheads Vittorio’s younger brother and sister before his eyes. With no one left alive in the castle, Vittorio vows vengeance on the demons, arranges his family’s bodies in a crypt, then takes all the money and jewelry he can rustle up and sets out for Florence. But as night falls, Ursula reappears and ravishes the16-year-old in his bed, insisting that she’s saved his life. Soon he finds himself adrift in a town that’s under a strange spell—it’s a sort of Pleasantville without any known illnesses, any need for nuns, or any hospitals. Another donnybrook with demons, though, lands Vittorio in the court of the Ruby Grail, whose kitchen serves as a holding cell for all the sick people who—ve been missing from the village below. Vengeance redux, though his feelings for Ursula take an odd upsurge. The story then mires down joyously in the blissful vigors of demonic blood, with blood flowing everywhichway, and in the horrid hungers it brings. Love blooms in blood. Drink up, Riceans!
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40160-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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