We repeat our earlier prayer to Arkham House, that they reprint the original Outsider and Others (1939), the basic text for...
The spirit of the Rhode Island Master descends upon 23 disciples willing to summon up the squids and squirms of the 20th-century’s weirdest and most influential horror writer. Over 107 other Cthulhu-“inspired” books cling to the eldritch penman from Providence. One tastes less of the coppery tang of blood from Lovecraft’s pen than the ripple of fear when cosmic Yog-Sothoths slip under your skin and race up your back—and you go about switching on lamps and the backyard houselight, checking the garage, weighing the creaks in the attic, and choosing not to go down to the cellar. Standouts here include esteemed stylist Poppy Z. Brite’s “Are You Loathsome Tonight?”—a tale worthy of Elvis’s blue suede shoes that ties up the Tupalo Troubador’s favored peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches fried in butter with Lovecraft’s thoughts about sensation. Brite in no way tries to explain or come to grips with Lovecraft, whose aliens remain unknowable even to him. Just as the unconscious is truly unconscious and not to be plumbed, aliens we might understand would no longer be alien. As Pelan and Adams explain, describing his creations out of space and time, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep are beyond genealogy. In China Miéville’s “Details,” an old woman recluse sees something looking at her from the lines of a brick wall and the leaves of a tree, something that is colonizing her memories and mind. Also here: the late and grisly Richard Laymon, with “The Cabin in the Woods”—about the “horrible thing” that wants to get into his cabin after sunset—and Caitlìn R. Kiernan (the recent Trilobite), who, in “Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea,” brings her glorious prose to bear on the geology of horror.
We repeat our earlier prayer to Arkham House, that they reprint the original Outsider and Others (1939), the basic text for all Lovecraft fans.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-44926-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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