In the prologue of this first grown-up novel by the creator of the super-selling Goosebumps and Fear Street series for kids, Charlotte Wilson has just had a tryst with a married man whom she picked up at a campus bar. A few pages later, poor Charlotte gets ripped to pieces by a purple something with a head and arms. By then you're hooked and, lucky you, it just gets better.
Stine sets his story in fictional Free-wood, Pa., where Liam O'Connor, an Irish professor of folklore, has been lured to teach. Sara Morgan, a graduate student fleeing from an obsessive boyfriend, doesn't mind one whit that the handsome prof with the lilting accent and the wavy hair flirts with her. But as Sara soon discovers, Liam is a superstitious sort. He fears black cats and shattered mirrors. He worries about getting out on the right side of the bed, and he won't eat eggs bought after dark.
How charming, Sara thinks at first. Coincidence, she reasons, when murders on the campus mount and all of the mutilated victims—skin peeled off, spines cracked—are in some way associated with gentle Liam. Besides, there are so many other suspicious nasties around to confuse our Sara: Liam's strange sister Margaret, for one; the libidinous college dean, Milton Cohn; and Sara's bitter ex-beau Chip. What's a girl to think?
This is ghoulish fun from the writer who has been giving kids the creeps with best-sellers for almost a decade. The prose is crisp, the horror delectable. Reading Stine is often compared with riding a roller coaster; with Superstitious, you're riding in the first car. (Warner Books, $21.95)
by Ben Bradlee
Talent can take you a long way; luck and talent can catapult you even further. Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Washington Post, has had his share of both, as he recounts in this colorful memoir. As a Washington correspondent for Newsweek in 1957, the Harvard-educated Bradlee moved with his second wife to the same Georgetown block where Sen. John Kennedy and his new wife would soon settle. The two couples became close friends, and Bradlee had comfortable access to the White House after Kennedy was elected President in 1960.
More than a decade later, Bradlee was at the helm of the Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young reporters on his metro staff, brought down the Nixon Presidency with their Watergate reporting. Bradlee was subsequently hailed as a journalistic hero, and Jason Robards Jr. played him in the movie All the President's Men.
In this autobiography, Bradlee, 74, who retired in 1991, is modest enough to acknowledge luck in his life and to admit that screenwriters inflated his role in the film, shortchanging other Post editors. His book suffers in that such subjects as JFK and Watergate have been so dissected, there is little fresh to add. Bradlee recounts how, after Kennedy's assassination, he tried to comfort the First Lady, telling her he hoped she would marry again. Later she wrote him a note saying she was stunned at what he had suggested and that she considered her life over.
The book's most intriguing section concerns Mary Pinchot Meyer, sister of Bradlee's second wife, Tony. Meyer was shot to death while walking along the Potomac River in 1964, and her diary revealed that she had been John Kennedy's mistress—unbeknownst to her sister and brother-in-law. Her murderer was never identified, and Bradlee discovered a high-ranking CIA officer searching Meyer's house for the diary the day after her death. Bradlee writes about this matter without comment, but obviously much remains unanswered about the circumstances of Mary Meyer's death.
After Watergate and Nixon's resignation, Bradlee still had questions he wanted to ask the disgraced President. In 1981, he thought he saw his chance. Vacationing with his third wife, writer Sally Quinn, at a resort on the Caribbean island of St. Maarten, he learned that Nixon was also a guest. When he later spied Nixon strolling on the beach toward him, Bradlee walked ahead, planning to turn around and confront him. But when he wheeled, the ex-President was gone. At least this time, Nixon had given the Post editor the slip. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50)
by Jack Newfield
Don King, a former Cleveland numbers czar, watched the first Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight from prison in 1971 (he was serving time for manslaughter) and wound up promoting the rubber match between those ring legends four years later. He has gone to the home of Nelson Mandela, to dinner with John Gotti—and to wherever it is one buys ermine-trimmed clothing. Though he sometimes sounds like a cross between the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and Kingfish (he says his adversaries practice "trickeration," and he often comically mangles the names of his fighters) no less a lawyer than ABSCAM prosecutor and later Claus von Bülow defender Thomas Puccio has called King "by far the smartest person I've ever cross-examined." That Jack Newfield, a veteran New York City newspaper columnist, could manage to write a dull book about King is, in its own way, a remarkable achievement.
The problems begin on the pages with Roman numerals, where Newfield informs us, "This book is not intended to be a full-life biography." Mmm. Since this is a full-price biography, the reader can be forgiven if he or she starts to feel like one of King's disgruntled clients. What exactly is New-field proffering here? The answer, alas, is a warmed-over recounting of King's professional résumé and some plodding accounts of court battles and prizefights. This book—a career long and an inch deep—is so devoid of personal detail that we never even learn where King lives.
The promoter's persuasive way with people remains a complete mystery. Newfield repeatedly asserts that King keeps a Svengali-like hold on Mike Tyson and other fighters, but he never explains how King sustains the spell long after the athletes realize that their purses are being plundered. King refused to discuss his techniques—or anything else—with the author. Absent also are interviews with key King rivals and cronies. The people who did talk to Newfield—including ex-heavyweight champ Tim Witherspoon and former King financial officer Joe Maffia—are portrayed as pitiable victims, though they will probably strike more discerning readers as nitwits or dupes. Until a better book comes along, those curious about King should sit back and watch him run boxing with his hair held high and the IRS on his back, a dealmaker who has conflicts where other people don't even have interests—a boor perhaps but, unlike this biography, never a bore. (Morrow, $23)
by Blake Morrison
British physician Arthur Morrison was an irritating and sometimes embarrassing father. Though the Yorkshireman was regarded by neighbors as an upstanding citizen, his unimpressed son Blake—the author of this heartfelt memoir—thought him an impatient and petty chance-taker, fond of "the queue-jump, the backhander, the deal under the table. Parking where you shouldn't, drinking after hours, accepting the poached pheasant and the goods off the back of the lorry." Resisting his father's intense pressure to pursue a medical career, Blake instead reads literature in college largely "to escape him, to enter a world outside his control."
And so it goes until late 1991, when Arthur—at 75 still nosing into his son's life—begins complaining about an upset "tummy." Doctors soon identify it as inoperable stomach cancer; he will die before Christmas.
In this anguished work, Morrison, a poet and staff writer for the British Independent newspaper, remembers Arthur's full life and bitterly details his swift decline. "I keep trying to find the last moment when he was still unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, him."
This is a furiously honest book—we learn that Dad's past may have also included an extramarital affair. After Arthur's passing, Blake struggles to hold on to the physical evidence of his life force—feeling the warmth ebb away from his forehead, resolutely watching as his body disappears behind the plain cover of a pine coffin, even dipping a hand in his father's ashes to taste the "smoky nothingness on my tongue.".
In these searing moments, the author captures the grief and unanticipated sense of bewilderment felt after a parent's death. "I thought that to see my father dying might remove my fear of death, and so it did," he concludes. "I hadn't reckoned on its making death seem preferable to life." Morrison has produced a book both elegant and elegiac; only lack of exposure can keep this fine work from being regarded as a classic. (Picador, $21.00)
>R.L. Stine
SCARING THE GROWNUPS
With a kids' following that snarls traffic when he shows up to sign autographs, 51-year-old R.L. Stine (whose two paperback series sell a total of 1,250,000 copies a month) was never tempted to write adult fiction until TV and movie producer Brandon Tartikoff called one day and made him an irresistible offer. "He called and said, 'You write an adult horror novel,' " recalls Stine, who lives in Manhattan with his wife, Jane, and son Matthew, 15, " 'and I'll produce the movie.' I figured after 25 years I needed a new adventure."
How was writing for adults different?
When I write the children's books, I'm so careful not to be too real. Suddenly I could be as scary as I wanted, even brutal. My friends were shocked; my mother was horrified. Also, I didn't have to have a happy ending. I once wrote a Fear Street where the bad girl won, and the kids sent me hate mail. I figured that adults can take it.
Do you have to get in a creepy mood to write?
I'm disciplined. I don't have to be in any mood. I set a goal—20 pages a clay. I'm at the computer at nine and I finish by four. I have a horror writer friend who has to have special music playing and sits at a haunted desk. All I have for atmosphere is a plastic skeleton. I just love writing this stuff.
What was the biggest challenge?
Having a main character who was Irish. What do I know from Irish? My wife has a crush on Daniel Day-Lewis. She said, "Write whatever you want, but there has to be a big part for Daniel Day-Lewis.' "
- Contributors:
- Louisa Ermelino,
- Clare McHugh,
- Charles Leerhsen,
- David Ellis.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
