In McCandless’ debut horror novel, a ragtag crew sets out after a killer leaving a gruesome trail through the East Texas wilderness.
In 1911, something is killing people in the howling wilderness area of East Texas known as the Big Thicket, and it’s not just killing them in a conventional way—it’s ripping them apart, partially eating them and draining them of their blood. A motley posse not fit for a B-western, consisting of a slow-on-the-draw sheriff, an erudite black doctor, a mysterious Texas Ranger and a Forrest Gump-clone, among others, determines to hunt down the thing before it can get somewhere really remote and replicate in anticipation of an assault on humanity. What they discover on their quest, and who they discover is in league with the creature, adds even more spice to this entertaining and often creepy tale. McCandless wisely doesn’t burden the book with a typical main character/hero dripping with save-the-day traits and ironic one-liners; instead, the author fleshes out each of the characters that make up the not-so-merry band of hunters. Even the victims aren’t just dealt with in the one-chop-and-out method common to bad entertainment; they are given back stories and more purpose than just serving as creature fodder. The author channels his inner Bram Stoker at times and moves the story along via letters, newspaper accounts and other indirect narrative devices. A Texan himself, the author bases a lot of the story on studies of regional folklore and oilfield legends. The quickly paced tale is graphically gory in spots, and the book’s back cover contains a warning to that effect, as well as an advisory that the book is not recommended for readers under the age of 18. A well-executed journey into the macabre that should give anyone pause before walking through a desolate area at night.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615544861
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Ninth Planet
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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