One wishes for a slightly—ahem—tastier and less flabby gathering. But if zombies are your cup of meat, this is just the...
“They sat like people asleep with their eyes open, staring, but seeing nothing.” A Tea Party rally? No, no: A clutch of zombies, the stars of Penzler’s (The Vampire Archives, 2009, etc.) latest mega-anthology.
Zombies are the latest big thing, of course, at least in filmdom. But whereas the zombies of the movies now move quickly, eat all body parts indiscriminately and explode very nicely, the zombies of literature (pulp, mostly) are a slower and ever so slightly more stately bunch of ghouls. Consider Penzler’s starting point, a story from 1929 called “Dead Men Working in the Cane Fields,” in which you’d have to look very hard to see that those unseeing, eyes-wide-open folks were truly the walking undead and not, in fact, merely suffering from a bad hangover after one too many mojitos. Many of Penzler’s selections are variations on a very limited theme: A traveler to some torrid country down Caribbean way finds, to his or her horror, that the locals are creepy-crawly types, “grayed to the hue of putrescent bone,” as writes one Arthur Leo Zagat—whether a forerunner of the restaurant guides, alas, we do not know, though the author of that starting-point tale did, Penzler delights in telling us, indulge in cannibalism. Some of Penzler’s choices are arguable: Sure, Guy De Maupassant’s story “Was It a Dream?” sports a mention of a poor schmo walking “with extended arms, knocking against the tombs,” but it’s a stretch, probably, to include it in the canon of zombie lit. Inarguably zombielicious, though, are Karen Haber’s latter-day tale “Red Angels,” with its sly good humor (“The best artist in Haiti is some sort of undead thing that just drools and paints”), Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s very strange short story “The Song the Zombie Sang,” and H.P. Lovecraft’s spooky (natch) confection “Herbert West—Reanimator.” On the down side, Penzler does not satisfactorily explain his criteria for inclusion, and there are a couple of iffy picks, including the endless “Z is for Zombie”; his introduction is glancing, and some fine recent tales (notably Max Brooks’ World War Z) go unnoticed.
One wishes for a slightly—ahem—tastier and less flabby gathering. But if zombies are your cup of meat, this is just the thing.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-74089-2
Page Count: 827
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
