Available:*
Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Copies | [[missing key: search.ChildField.ITEM_NOTE]] | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Prescott Public Library | Book | DONOHUE, KEITH | 1 | Searching... Unknown | |
Searching... Sedona Public Library | Book | DONOHUE, K. | 1 | .SOURCE. BT 10/14/14 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Stolen Child comes a hypnotic literary horror novel about a young boy trapped inside his own world, whose drawings blur the lines between fantasy and reality.
Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, ten-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire. His mother, Holly, begins to hear strange sounds in the night coming from the ocean, and she seeks answers from the local Catholic priest and his Japanese housekeeper, who fill her head with stories of shipwrecks and ghosts. His father, Tim, wanders the beach, frantically searching for a strange apparition running wild in the dunes. And the boy's only friend, Nick, becomes helplessly entangled in the eerie power of the drawings. While those around Jack Peter are haunted by what they think they see, only he knows the truth behind the frightful occurrences as the outside world encroaches upon them all.
In the tradition of The Turn of the Screw , Keith Donohue's The Boy Who Drew Monsters is a mesmerizing tale of psychological terror and imagination run wild, a perfectly creepy read for a dark night.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The ghostly influence of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw haunts this chilling novel by Donohue ( The Stolen Child ), which follows a troubled boy whose interest in drawing coincides with the appearance of strange creatures around his family's dream house in coastal Maine. When Jack Peter Jip Keenan, an agoraphobic, occasionally violent 10-year-old with high-functioning Asperger's, takes up drawing, his parents, Holly and Tim, hope this new creative outlet will help to combat Jip's introversion. But, over the course of a bleak December, a series of inexplicable phenomena--a beast-like man in the road, the bone of a human arm in the sand, visions of evil babies scuttling... like silverfish across a page, etc.--begin to throw the family, as well as Jip's only friend, Nick, off-balance. With Jip receding further into himself, and his drawings--visually linked to the phenomena--growing darker, Holly seeks the counsel of a mysterious church worker, Miss Tiramaku, who, having Asperger's herself, believes she knows Jip's secret. Donohue is an adept creator of atmosphere--the nor'easter that frames the novel's climax is expertly rendered--but repetitive flashbacks and the characters' underdeveloped emotions detract from what is otherwise a brisk and winningly creepy narrative. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
What happens when the monsters under the bed come from the boy sleeping on top of it? Jack Peter is not a normal boy, and it's beginning to take its toll on his family. He's always been an odd child, but at 7, he nearly drowned and withdrew from the world. For the three years since, he has refused to leave the house, preferring to move from obsession to obsession, occasionally being bundled into a wad of blankets to be taken to the doctor. When the book begins, his obsession has moved from playing war to drawing monsters, and Nick, a relatively normal boy who is Jack's only remaining friend, is swept up in the furor. But Jack's parents and Nick are beginning to hear and see things that seem otherworldly, and it becomes clear that Jack's drawings reflect, or perhaps even create, the odd sounds and creatures. His parents, Tim and Holly, baffled by the happenings and frightened by the cracks in their marriage, try desperately to solve the growing mysteries. All suspect they are going insane; Tim takes to roaming the foggy beaches, Holly turns to the church, and Nick keeps tagging along with Jack. Donohue's (The Stolen Child, 2006, etc.) writing is as evocative as Jack Peter's drawings, both startling and heavy with emotion. The pacing is steady and recalls other recent works of literary horror, in which the terror of the monsters is uneasily balanced with the mundanity of everyday life. This doesn't discredit Jack's creatures at all, though; in fact, they're terrifying. With such a spooky novel, it's almost too much to hope for a good ending, but Donohue manages to surprise and satisfy nonetheless. A sterling example of the new breed of horror: unnerving and internal with just the right number of bumps in the night. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Three years ago, Jack Peter Keenan was a normal little boy. But since an incident in which he almost drowned, he's withdrawn into himself; now the 10-year-old undergoing therapy and on medication designed to ease his anxieties is afraid to leave the house. And, apparently, he's taken up drawing not the usual happy doodlings of a youngster, but dark, frightening images that appear, in defiance of all logic, to be manifesting themselves in the real world: the boy's parents begin to see and hear strange things, to wonder if there is some otherworldly presence haunting them. Although Jack Peter loves his parents, it's really only his friend, Nick, who's able to pull Jack Peter out of his inner gloom. But it soon becomes clear to Jack Peter's parents that Nick may be involved in whatever nasty stuff is going on in the real world. This is a traditional horror story something you could easily imagine Graham Masterton writing with a delicious twist near the end that makes you rethink everything you've just read.--Pitt, David Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"WHAT A DASHING and beautiful figure Lestat was," an elderly vampire moons at a pivotal moment in Anne Rice's PRINCE LESTAT (Knopf, $28.95), succinctly stating the novel's theme. The natty vamp Lestat de Lioncourt - decked out for this occasion, a kind of worldwide blood-drinkers summit, "in a fresh and showstopping ensemble of Ralph Lauren wool plaids and pastel linen and silk" - was present at the creation of Rice's long-running Vampire Chronicles series, which began with "Interview With the Vampire" in 1976. Brooding furiously, he dominated that book, commanding it as effortlessly as he does the attention of his fellow vampires in this latest installment. Lestat's vampirism dates from the late 18th century, but his star quality seems very much the product of the time in which Rice gave birth to him, the 1970s: "Interview With the Vampire" reads like a People magazine profile written by Ann Radcliffe. (People had begun publication just a couple of years earlier.) Although the style, mixing celebrity-worshiping gush with Gothic portentousness, is, not to put too fine a point on it, nutty, Rice wielded it with amazing self-assurance, as if it were inevitable, something that had been waiting to be discovered. That's what all pop-culture geniuses do, in their different ways. And over nearly four decades and many, many books, she has seen no reason to change it. In "Prince Lestat," the first Vampire Chronicles novel in a decade, Rice's queenly prose is unaltered. Time cannot wither nor custom stale its infinite monotony. The years have taken their toll in other respects. "Interview With the Vampire" was at least arguably horror fiction: Although Lestat and his cronies were the heroes, their depredations did still have the power to shock, in part because there was always at least one character - the interviewer - to represent the perspective of the non-undead. In the subsequent books, Rice seemed to lose interest in the human point of view, preferring instead to burrow deeper into the blood-drinkers' tenebrous world: its origins, its day-to-day (or night-to-night) problems, its tangled internal politics. By this late stage of the Vampire Chronicles, Rice has constructed such a fearsomely elaborate mythology that "Prince Lestat" requires a ton of supplementary material even to be comprehensible. The book includes an introductory recap of vampire history (called "Blood Genesis"), a glossary of Rice-specific terminology ("Blood Argot") and, at the end, a sorely needed list of dramatis personae and an "informal guide" to the previous volumes, without all of which paraphernalia the uninitiated reader would be utterly lost. What plot there is takes an agonizingly long time to rev up because there's so much back story to fill in, and even when it reaches cruising speed the narrative momentum is rather leisurely. The novel's only subject, really, is the greatness of Lestat, who sometimes narrates and is otherwise merely spoken of in hushed, awe-struck tones - even before he nobly saves the entire vampire race from extinction. Although this is a dreadful novel, it has to be said that the earnestness with which Rice continues to toil at her brand of pop sorcery has an odd, retro sort of charm, an aura redolent of the desperate, decadent silliness of the disco era. "Prince Lestat" has nothing to do with horror and even less to do with the Romantic literature Rice tries to evoke, but she and her hero are possessed of a certain louche conviction - a sense that although their time is passing, they will grit their pointy teeth and boogie on. These days, vampires are pretty scarce in horror fic- tion. For many of them, the party has moved elsewhere, to the hybrid genre known as "paranormal romance," in which impossible beings gambol to their own weird beats. (Those awful, smelly zombie arrivistes have simply ruined the horror scene.) And the glittery night world of the Vampire Chronicles doesn't have the allure it once had for readers of mainstream horror, who now seem to prefer to stay at home and worry about household maintenance, difficult children and rude ghosts. Several of these tales of middle-class domestic anxiety are out at the moment, the most interesting being Keith Donohue's THE BOY WHO DREW MONSTERS (Picador, $26), Lauren Oliver's ROOMS (Ecco/HarperCollins, $25.99) and Siobhan Adcock's THE BARTER (Dutton, $26.95). In Donohue's ingenious novel, Holly and Tim Keenan, living in their "dream house" on the rugged coast of Maine, notice some disturbing changes in their 10-year-old son, Jack Peter. A solitary, fearful kid even at the best of times, he has begun to suffer from terrible nightmares, dreaming of monsters who "lay a hand upon his shoulder" and "whisper in his ear as he slept." While the parents fret and bicker, strange creatures - perhaps actual monsters - start to appear, as if summoned by the boy's increasingly fevered imagination. Donohue unspools his simple story patiently, delivering jolts when necessary, but mostly concentrating on the stress generated in a family with an unhappy child. It's a modest novel, elegantly worked, with a nice chilly twist at the end. Oliver's "Rooms," which also takes place in an old house in the Northeast inhabited by a dysfunctional family, is a more ambitious but more ramshackle construction, with multiple narrators, several ghosts, an unusually busy plot and a tricky structure. Although the novel is, from time to time, pleasantly spooky, even Oliver's best scare effects don't linger long in the mind because there's so much bric-a-brac. The storytelling is jittery, cluttered, unsettling in some of the right ways and quite a few of the wrong ones. (Maybe a feng shui makeover. ...) "Rooms" has neither the shamelessness of pulp horror nor the focused intensity of a literary ghost story, in which the apparitions bring forth truths about the troubled souls of both the living and the dead. There's plenty of activity, human and otherwise, in these rooms, but the novel feels like too much house for the small ideas that rattle around in it. Adcock's novel, her first, seems initially no more than another of these cozy domestic hauntings, distinct only in its setting - suburban Texas, rather than the usual rural Northeast. The young family here consists of Bridget; her husband, Mark; and their infant daughter, Julie. Bridget is ambivalent about having given up the practice of law for motherhood; Mark works punishingly long hours as a web designer; and Julie's just a cute kid. Into this banal life steps a mighty insistent spirit, the shade of a dead woman who seems unhealthily interested in the little girl. Adcock describes the specter vividly: "The edges of her body, her head, her limbs, seem constantly to be shifting, growing enormous and grotesque and then shrinking, angling away, diminishing to an equally grotesque size, out of proportion to what her body seems to want to be. It is like watching a maddened Picasso try to struggle out of its frame." The ghost becomes a constant, vaguely threatening presence in the family's otherwise ordinary lives, and Bridget goes haywire trying to get it to go away. She doesn't know, or especially care, who the dead woman was. But the reader does, because in alternating chapters "The Barter" tells the story of another frazzled wife and mother, named Rebecca, who lived a brief, unsatisfying farm-country life in the early 20th century, before the bright suburbs claimed the land. Rebecca's tale of her ill-fated marriage is interesting, deep and sad, and it gives perspective to the doubts and minor irritations of Bridget's relationship with Mark. It's as if this house had been invaded by an unfamiliar sort of gravity, a sense that life can be heavy and consequential in ways good suburban mommies and daddies only dimly understand. In a way, this sorrowful spirit allows Adcock to make excellent sport of the culture of modern middle-class parenting. With the ghost looming, the petty concerns of the local youngmom cadre look dopier than ever to Bridget, who gradually loses patience with the conventions that rule her narrow world. We see her measuring her old, trivial anxieties against this huge new thing, this fear, as she begins to realize that what you're afraid of is part of who you are. "The Barter" is a thoughtful and surprisingly witty novel. It weighs its horrors precisely. And that's a crucial quality in this genre: Horror works best when it's about things that are actually worth being afraid of. Like Siobhan Adcock, the English writer Chaz Brenchley, who tells a bizarre coming-of-age story in his lovely short novel BEING SMALL (Per Aspera; cloth, $19.99; paper, $9.99), knows how to give some heft and gravity to the anxieties of everyday life. His narrator, 16-year-old Michael, is, like every teenager, trying to figure out who he is, but his version of that perennial problem is unique: He was born with his dead twin, whom he calls Small, inside his own body, and feels him there still. Michael and his ditsy mother live a bohemian life on the fringes of Oxford. They speak of Small as if they were describing a real person, and although Michael protests that his phantom brother "is not a metaphor, for my use or anyone's else," that is, of course, exactly what Small is: an embodiment of Michael's ambivalence about the person he is, or is not, becoming. He tries on ways of interpreting his resident alter ego: "He can be my cold and unreachable heart, the figure in my carpet, the ghost in my machine; or he can be my savior, my criterion, deus ex machina, the point of my perspective." He comes closest, perhaps, when he refers to Small as "the mote in my inward eye" because the issue, throughout, is how Michael sees himself: whether he feels he's living his own life or someone else's and, come to that, which life he would prefer. Not much of a truly horrific nature happens in "Being Small" - Brenchley's tone is quiet, contemplative - but it's intensely dramatic, in the way adolescent problems tend to be, in teenagers' inward eyes. "It might be war," Michael announces, "where only the strong survive." Brenchley makes this tooth-and-claw battle thrilling. There are also bloody, bruising conflicts in Patrick McCabe's HELLO MR. BONES AND GOODBYE MR. RAT (Quercus, $24.99), which brings together a pair of rambunctious short novels, both narrated (very unreliably) by ghosts. In the first, a demonic pedophile named Balthazar Bowen, self-slaughtered, gleefully recounts his attempt to destroy the life of the boy who, years before in Ireland, blew the whistle on his abuse. The victim, Valentine Shannon, is now, decades later, a grown man on the verge of happiness, which inspires Bowen (a.k.a. Mr. Bones, among other guises) to destroy poor Valentine's hopes for normality. It's an appalling spectacle. But McCabe, as readers of his 1992 novel "The Butcher Boy" might remember, is expert at making the darkest deeds funny, forcing us to laugh at the worst things in the world. He writes like an Irish Lenny Bruce, riffing at warp speed, swerving from one time to another and one place to another and strewing the landscape with allusions - to Coleridge, Milton, Yeats, Marc Bolan, "Goodbye Mr. Chips," "Oliver!," Betty Boop and an annoyingly memorable toothpaste jingle, among others - and somehow it all makes sense. By the end, you might feel, as Valentine does, "captive in the dread country of delusion and irrationality," but if you're not blinded by McCabe's verbal pyrotechnics you can make out where he's been going. This story is about the struggle to break free of a dire past; about the powerful forces arrayed against reason, sanity, happiness itself; about the demons that keep us locked up in old obsessions. If this sounds like an allegory of the long troubles of McCabe's native island, that's no accident, and in "Goodbye Mr. Rat" he states his case a wee bit more directly. The narrator here is a dead I.R.A. bomber named Gabriel King, who may or may not have been an informer. After his death, in America, his ashes are being carried back to Ireland by his friend Beni Banikin, a lesbian playwright who is herself a casualty of a violent history. The tone of "Goodbye Mr. Rat" is more muted and mournful than that of "Hello Mr. Bones," but McCabe's writing is no less brazenly allusive - the major points of reference here are Yeats's play "The Dreaming of the Bones," Coleridge again ("A frightful fiend doth close behind him tread"), the Band, Thin Lizzy, "Toy Story" and Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar" - and Gabriel is no more to be trusted than Balthazar Bowen was. Different though they are, the novels come together when you're finished reading, creating a single vision of the horrors that crush people's souls. The stories McCabe tells have a terrible beauty. Next to them, the problems of a bunch of vampires don't amount to a hill of beans. TERRENCE RAFFERTY, the author of "The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies," is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Library Journal Review
Jack Peter (JP) Keenan is a ten-year-old agoraphobic with Asperger's who lives with his parents, Holly and Tim, in an isolated home on the coast of Maine. To mentally escape his self-imposed solitude-triggered by a near-drowning three years before-JP draws monsters. Among them: a wretched, haunting figure that prowls the sea; a pale, naked man who roams the snow; and a creature with smallpox scars and rotten teeth. JP shares his obsessive drawings with his best friend, Nick, and encourages him to draw some, too. Meanwhile, JP's parents begin to experience troubling phenomena, including auditory hallucinations, visions, and debilitating headaches. It seems JP's imagination has taken on a life of its own-and young Nick, JP's only remaining friend, is unwittingly involved in it all. VERDICT Although the characters are too understated at times, the novel unfolds through rich prose and a deeply imagined story. The plot takes its time; it's not one to rush through. The final page-the final sentence, really-comes as a clever surprise, but one that resonates soundly. Fans of Donohue's acclaimed first novel, The Stolen Child, will be pleased. Also recommended for readers of Joe Hill. [See Prepub Alert, 4/14/14.]-Erin Kelly, Media, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.