The Historian’s premise—an interesting twist on the Dracula legend—hooked me, and then the story hooked me and wouldn’t let go. (By pure coincidence, I read it right after having re-read Stoker’s Dracula.) Kostova manages a complex plot, various characters, and several time periods in the 20th century while not getting bogged down in minutiae. Her scene descriptions, particularly of Budapest and Istanbul, I found amazing. As the perspectives of different characters in different decades are depicted, it feels somewhat like frame stories within frame stories, and is all the more compelling for that. There were lots of “Wow” moments. This is one of those books I wish I’d written, but I’m happy Elizabeth Kostova wrote it.
Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an evil hidden in the depths of history. In those few quiet moments, she unwittingly assumes a quest she will discover is her birthright - a hunt for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of…
In terms of style, I see Cormac McCarthy as a writer who fully takes on Hemingway’s dictum of simplicity in the service of conveying complex emotion, and takes it even further by eschewing what he sees as unneeded punctuation: One would be hard-pressed to find a comma anywhere in this book, and the dialogue has no quotation marks (and then there is McCarthy’s famous disdain for the semicolon). I found this style distracting for the first page, but I immediately got used to it, and it made the story become a smooth flow of scenes and events at once vivid and disturbing.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
In a sense, this story is very simple: In just about the worst conceivable circumstances, a father strives desperately to find a way for a better life—and even a chance at life—for the son he loves deeply, and he is constantly ready and willing to sacrifice his own comfort and safety (what little there is) to attain that goal. The simple yet difficult obstacles to this, as the two travel on foot across a landscape devastated by a nuclear holocaust, prevent the story from becoming an emotionally manipulative tear-jerker. There is beauty and horror here. As in Blood Meridian, McCarthy shows us the worst and the best of what human beings can be in this truly amazing work. (It should also be required reading for every person with access to nuclear missile codes.)
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if…
It is 1899, and Thomas Edison has proclaimed his invention of the spirit phone, a device to contact the dead. On that same day, a young occultist named Aleister Crowley survives a devastating psychic attack in Tibet, only to find himself inexplicably teleported to the Manhattan home of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant and eccentric inventor. Crowley, perceiving a connection between this event and Edison’s bizarre new invention, convinces Tesla to help him investigate.
Amidst an ever-growing epidemic of insanity and suicide among spirit phone users, Crowley and Tesla combine their respective talents in “magick” and technology to uncover the device’s secret origin: an obscure and arcane evil stretching back to the dawn of civilization. An evil that threatens humanity itself.
