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Title: Kissing the Beehive by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0-575-40291-1 Publisher: Orion Publishing Co Pub. Date: 10 August, 2000 Format: Paperback |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (17 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: One of Carroll's best, deals with murderous obsession
Comment: Kissing the Beehive Carroll's latest foray into sinister stealth
By Bram Eisenthal
It was 1985 when I first discovered one of the horror field's greatest latter-day writers. I asked a clerk at Ottawa's House of Speculative Fiction if he could recommend someone really unusual - I had my fill of early Stephen King at the time - and he immediately whipped out a book and thrust it at me. "Land of Laughs," he said. "It's unbelievable... really different."
I had never even heard of Jonathan Carroll before and I generally knew my horror authors, so I was perturbed. How good could he be? Published in 1980 and the New York-born resident of Vienna's first novel, The Land of Laughs lived up to the clerk's billing. Highly imaginative and very frightening, it showcased the talents of a writer who excels at setting a macabre stage by allowing the horror to creep up on you v-e-r-r-r-y slowly. His tales are happy, funny and whimsical to start with, but chapter by chapter, Carroll adds sinister elements. Before you realize it, you're staring death squarely in the face. His second, Voice of Our Shadow, is even more shocking for its sinister stealth.
Kissing the Beehive is Carroll's tenth novel; one of the more recent ones, The Panic Hand, is a Bram Stoker Award-winning anthology that I highly recommend. As with the others, Beehive begins innocently enough, with a few stragglers rather than the swarm yet to come. Author Sam Bayer is in a slump, meeting with his agent in an attempt to untangle the cobwebs responsible for his terrible writer's block. His pending divorce is really creating havoc. Later, at a book signing, he meets an incredibly gorgeous fan, a California blonde named Veronica Lake. She really knows her Bayer, down to her business card, which contains an image from his novel The Tatooed City.
Bayer jogs his sluggish memory in an attempt to birth ideas. He drives to his hometown of Crane's View, visits old haunts, looks through high-school yearbooks and greets former acquaintances. The trip is the perfect panacea for his blues, as Bayer delves into an unsolved boyhood murder mystery, that of a free-spirited young woman named Pauline Ostrova. Her nude body, which had spawned so many adolescent fantasies, had been found by the young Bayer. Over the years, he had shunted the awful memory aside, but now he seizes the opportunity to gather important facts and unburden his soul.
During the excitement, unable to get her out of his thoughts, Bayer contacts Veronica Lake, they meet again and make love. He tells her about the burgeoning plot for his new novel and she is thrilled about her confidante status. Remember, she is his number one fan, like the character in Stephen King's Misery... only much more dangerous.
Bayer heads back to Crane's View, his teenaged daughter Cassandra in tow. He meets up with Frannie McCabe, childhood bad-boy turned chief of police, and brings up the Ostrova mystery. The police chief has his own take on the dossier and suspects that the town's crime boss, Gordon Cadmus, since murdered, had something to do with her demise. She had been seeing his son David, now a Hollywood film producer... and the old man as well.
In typical Carroll fashion, the story begins its slow spiral into madness just as Bayer and McCabe initiate their joint sleuthing. Also, something is terribly wrong with Veronica Lake. Bayer uncovers unsettling facts about her, most notably the fact she was two-time porn movie headliner Marzi Pan and a member of an infamous suicide cult. He decides not to see her any more, which first saddens and then infuriates her. Meanwhile, someone with knowledge of their unofficial Ostrova investigation is following Bayer and McCabe around, as well as videotaping unspeakable things, like the murder of David Cadmus on an L.A. street.
Lake, whom Bayer is trying to ignore, is in-his-face throughout. She slyly interacts with all his witnesses, subtly threatens his daughter and her boyfriend and, after McCabe barely survives an attempt on his life, befriends the cop. We also learn that she is a deft film technician and has been taping lots of footage, including shots of Bayer taken in a suit he had discarded years before and explicit images of them having sex.
The horror escalates when Cassandra goes missing, every father's nightmare but nothing compared to Bayer's ultimate scenario. His novel has taken the most sinister twist possible.
Jonathan Carroll is still unknown to many fans of mainstream horror literature, rather surprising in light of the stellar quality of every single one of his works. The author humbly pays homage to "Pat Conroy, Stephen King, Michael Moorcock, Paul West - Friends, Mentors, Wizards" - in the dedication, but I dare say that he has earned the right to appear right up there with them on that marquee.
In Doubleday's press release on Kissing the Beehive, King is equally complimentary, one master of the macabre to another. "A stunning novel of obsession and memory by the always amazing Jonathan Carroll. A brilliant writer - Jonathan Carroll is as scary as Hitchcock, when he isn't being as funny as Jim Carrey."
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Kissing the Beehive Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday HC, 232 pgs., $31.95
Rating: 5
Summary: One of Jonathan Carroll's most accessible books to date
Comment: I believe that this is one of Jonathan Carroll's best works to date. (Yes, I've read them all.) While I adored "Bones of the Moon", "Kissing the Beehive" is only the second of his works that I've finished completely satisfied. I can live without the usual magical plot devices if I get the plot and character quality of this book in its place.
Rating: 4
Summary: More mystery than fantasy
Comment: Carroll is one of my favorite authors and he doesn't dissapoint with "Kissing The Beehive." However, this novel is much more a straight mystery story than Carroll's other efforts that always seem to have several fantastical elements to them. I gave the book only four stars because it was missing that bizarre twist that seems to surface halfway through other Carroll novels (e.g., the dog talking in Land of Laughs). Regardless, I do recommend this book. As with all of Carroll's work, it keeps you totally engrossed in the story till the very end.
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Title: After Silence by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0385473516 Publisher: Main Street Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: FROM THE TEETH OF ANGELS by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0385468415 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 01 April, 1994 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Outside the Dog Museum by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0553561642 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 February, 1993 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: The Marriage of Sticks by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0312872437 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 04 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Wooden Sea : A Novel by Jonathan Carroll ISBN: 0765300133 Publisher: Tor Books Pub. Date: 09 February, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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