Twenty-some items, mostly collected from magazines, by America's most prolific living horror-master, including a doggerel called "Paranoid: A Chant" that sounds like an amazingly accurate parody of Absolutely Bob Dylan. King's fans—who must revel in his huffery-puffery space-filling—will find their favorite as peppery as ever. In each of these pieces, no matter how ineffective, King strikes upon some truly unsettling image that only he would have the persistence to uncover. In the most ambitious, a short novel called "The Mist," a Maine heatwave announces the coming of a living, bloodsucking, tentacle—filled white mist that eats up woods, radio stations, drugstores, and just plain brand-name folks who are trapped in a supermarket and fighting back with Raid insecticide and burning brooms dipped in lighter fluid. The horrormist is never explained, but one cannot avoid feeling that it is a self-punishing psychic projection of King's consumer society, which is mocked up from paste characters without a single breath of life in them. King sculpts these dummies with as much art as he has, but it is an art which has failed to deepen since Salem's Lot, his most carefully styled novel. King's shorter stories are more artful, but even so, judging them against each other is as hard as telling a Wheaties box from a Fruit Loops box by chewing on each. "Survivor Type" is a parody of survivor stories in which a drug-pushing surgeon is stranded on an island and—high on smack and low on food—forces himself to begin eating himself, starting with a cracked leg. In "The Word Processor of the Gods," the genie in a Wang begins fulfilling a writer's dreams by deleting him of his fat wife and clinker son and inserting him the wife and son he longs for—a lively conceit that King works to a warm, sentimental climax which avoids the strong, hard punch the reader asks for. His oldest story, "The Reaper's Image," written at age 18, tells of an ancient mirror which disappears people. The newest story, "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" (1983), is about a one-shot successful novelist who feeds his typewriter peanut butter and jelly because some elves called Fornits live on the keys and sprinkle gold dust (fornus) on his copy. Then his alcoholic editor starts to go mad as well in a folie a deux. So, bizarre little spellbinders, but more pulpy and concocted than truly driven in their bizarreness.
Pub Date: June 21, 1985
ISBN: 0451168615
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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