A celebrated playwright is stalked by his muse in Cadnum's first non-occult novel, an overwrought thriller that's nonetheless as effectively macabre as his supernatural yarns (St. Peter's Wolf, 1991, etc.). Hamilton Speke is the ``great man'' whose life shatters when he receives a call from Timothy Asquith, the long-lost writing partner of his youth, who—we know but Speke doesn't—has gone on to an obscure career as a serial killer while Speke has vaulted to world acclaim. Speke agrees to meet his old friend at Speke's estate; there, Asquith, glittering with malice, accuses Speke of stealing his early manuscripts and passing them off as his own, and demands all that Speke now possesses. Knowing that Asquith is telling the truth, Speke offers a cash settlement; Asquith, enraged, attacks Speke, who impales him on a fireplace mantel. Racked by guilt and fear, Speke buries Asquith; but time and again during the next few days, the playwright terrifyingly spies Asquith lurking among the estate's shadows. Has the victim returned to haunt his killer? Not at all, Speke learns, when in a frenzy he digs up Asquith's grave and finds only a rotting deer—forcing Asquith to reveal himself: The ``murder'' was only a vengeful bit of staging by Asquith, who—with the help of a surprise accomplice- -dug himself out of the grave, wiped off the fake blood, and posed as a ghost. Now that Speke knows he's alive, though, Asquith turns to his greatest skill—slaughter—and rampages through the estate, which he's set on fire, in a climactic bloodbath. When Speke tries to put out the fire, he is ``fighting chaos itself, the void that waits to thaw and flood, the black fire that consumes every human hope''—a typically overblown sentiment in Cadnum's hyperbolic horror tale, always gripping and smartly paced but usually shaded just this side of ludicrous—and sometimes not even.
Pub Date: July 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-88184-801-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1992
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
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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