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
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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