An outlandish but superfluous zombie yarn that is gruesome, imaginative and grateful to its inspirations.
A rogue scientist’s experiment in revenge wreaks havoc on a rural township in Pennsylvania.
A rare one-off from the prolific Maberry (Dust & Decay, 2011, etc.) recycles bits and pieces from B-horror flicks and adds a few twists of its own. The author dedicates the book to George A. Romero, penning an unapologetic love letter to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, right down to a setting in rural Pennsylvania. It’s here in pastoral Stebbins County that things go to hell. It starts at a new-age funeral home whose proprietor, Doc “Lee” Hartnup, is startled to find the corpse of serial killer Homer Gibbon. Stumbling into a grotesque crime scene are two local cops, JT Hammond and his partner Desdemona “Dez” Fox. JT is more soulful, a quiet, cautious cop and father figure. Predictably, the book focuses on the voluptuous Dez: “Built like Scarlett Johansson, with ice blue eyes, bee-stung lips and a natural blonde if the rumors were true.” Her self-destructive rage veers dangerously near caricature while her characterization as “Genghis Khan with boobs” doesn’t exactly inspire affection. Still, this shortcoming won’t detract Maberry’s legions from enjoying his breathless, clipped prose as the zombie plague accelerates—just as a hurricane bears down on Stebbins County. The truly creepy part comes when local hack and serial-killer aficionado Billy Trout starts tracking down Gibbon’s back story. Billy roots out Dr. Herman Volker, an East German scientist smuggled out by the CIA. To avenge an old family trauma, Volker has resurrected a secret formula. “Can you think of a more fitting punishment for a serial murderer than to be awake and aware in a coffin while his body slowly rots?” Volker’s detailed, believable description of the unspeakable cocktail he’s invented, right down to cribbing from The Serpent and the Rainbow, is as inventive as it is sickening.
An outlandish but superfluous zombie yarn that is gruesome, imaginative and grateful to its inspirations.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-250-00089-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
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
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