Penzler has assembled what ought to be the last word in vampire-ish verbiage. Yet, given that there’s money to be made in...
“Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” Thus Sherlock Holmes, a rare grown-up voice to counter an infantilized world of werewolves, monsters, zombies and vampires.
To scan today’s bookstore shelves is to see that the last category of fictional beings is a hot ticket. It raises a contrarian question as well: In a nation where most adults believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, might they not also believe that vampire books count as nonfiction? Maybe. But the 6,000-year-old-Earth types aren’t likely to be big readers to begin with. Not so the vampire-lit crowd, huge, growing and not content to sink its teeth into a single volume, as witness the success of Stephenie Meyer and Charlaine Harris. There are better books in the genre, notably Dacre Stoker’s new Dracula the Un-Dead. Yet, if zombie buffs have long had a better inventory from which to draw—Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and World War Z can do wonders of a listless evening, after all—vampires clearly win the argument, if only in sheer literary bulk. Witness, as evidence, Otto Penzler’s new anthology The Vampire Archives (Vintage; $25.00; October; ISBN 978-0-307-47389-9), which weighs in at more than 1,000 pages. So big is the book that, if carefully positioned atop one, it would keep all but the sturdiest of the undead from opening a coffin lid from inside, which, come to think of it, might make a nice premise for a sequel to the film Vampire’s Kiss. Penzler, chief mysterian at the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and a well-practiced anthologist, is clearly of the more-is-better school, and he turns up little gems of vampirosity from all sorts of writers. Among the better known of them are Arthur Conan Doyle (of aforementioned Sherlock Holmes fame) and the always satisfying M.R. James, who had very specific rules for spinning out a supernatural tale (no sex, lots of malevolence), as well as Edgar Poe, Ambrose Bierce, D.H. Lawrence (who would have known that Lawrence ever wrote a vampire story?), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (ditto) and Guy de Maupassant (ditto ditto). Then there are legions of tale-spinners from the dime-store magazines of yore, perhaps best represented by Ray Bradbury, who closes a little vampire tale, as is his custom, on a note of delicious irony. (Beware the innocent kid, bloodsucker. Always beware the kid.) Stephen King gets a say, natch, and he does it with spine-tingling efficiency and sanguinary spurts. There are those who grew up outside the pulp tradition, too, such as Anne Rice and Clive Barker, who spin fine tales of their own. Only the very youngest writers seem to be missing, perhaps because there are so few suitably pulpy publications left for them to work in.
Penzler has assembled what ought to be the last word in vampire-ish verbiage. Yet, given that there’s money to be made in the puncture wounds, unreflective mirrors and pallid complexions of vampire lit, there will doubtless be many more such words to come. All we can do is hope for another fad to take its place, and soon. Killer robots? Flesh-stripping mosquitoes? Monster mutant MRSA? We’re on the edge of our seats.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-47389-9
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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