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
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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