by Roderick Anscombe
Bloodless as vampire tales go but still involving, this novel doesn't feature your generic Count Dracula. This guy is a Hungarian physician who apparently does his bloodletting offstage. Anscombe limits his graphic scenes to the count's attempt to seduce the female population of Paris during his medical school days there.
Laszlo may be too sincere to keep his membership in the vampire's guild, but he is a likable character. When not draining his victims' blood, he's human enough to worry about breaking their hearts. (Hyperion, $22.95)
by J. Gordon Melton
Get a life" seems inappropriate advice for someone obsessed by vampire lore. So maybe Melton should get a living death.
Not that compiling this 852-page encyclopedia of trivia can exactly be called living. Melton approaches his topic with little irony or any other kind of humor.
Among his heavy-handed entries are subjects like the Slavic Vampire Today ("Governments hostile to any form of supernaturalism have had a marked influence on the loss of belief in vampires.")
The author is certainly not critical. He generously labels Anne Rice a "major literary figure" and he refers to the abjectly ludicrous 1966 film Billy the Kid vs. Dracula as merely "an unfortunate marriage of the vampire and western genres." The positive side is that Melton limits himself in the bad-pun department, only letting slip one "bad blood." To take him on his own compulsively cross-referencing terms, Melton fails to include an entry on the Talamasca, the vampire-witch-monster-hunting organization that Rice uses in her novels, and his only reference to Count Chocula cereal is perfunctory. He is, on the other hand, rather taken with the vegetarian vampire rabbit Bunnicula, hero of a 1979 children's story (there are five citings for the ravenous rodent in Melton's index, only 51 fewer than there are for Bela Lugosi).
This is a swell reference work for your next term paper on pop culture oddities, but as enjoyable reading goes, it's as much fun as a poke in the neck with a sharp tooth. (Visible Ink, paper, $16.95)
by John Irving
Irving's latest creation is Farrokh Daruwalla, an Indian-born orthopedic surgeon living in Toronto who writes grade-B movies. As a hobby, Daruwalla collects blood from circus dwarfs to try to find the genetic basis for dwarfism, but his real passion—and only haven—is the circus.
Unfortunately this hefty (633 pages) novel is like a three-ring circus run amok. Unlike the author, Daruwalla is an unimaginative writer. His movie plots come from real life because "he couldn't even think of a story as good as the daily routine of the circus."
Still, there's always some arresting bit of action under the big tent of Irving's novel. This time, however, the ringmaster lacks control. (Random House, $25)
by Dolly Parton
Long before she was a star, Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, were looking for a parcel of land in Brentwood, Tenn., to build their dream house. "We'd better buy a big enough lot," she told Dean, "so that we can have privacy when the tour buses come by trying to look in." They bought 75 acres. Today, the tour buses do drive by but, thanks to Parton's prescience, the house is so far back no one can see in.
This book is a look-in on the self-described "trashy-looking blond country singer" whose matchless singing voice and unquestioning faith in herself led her from a sharecropper's cabin in east Tennessee to superstardom.
Dolly is full of obligatory celeb anecdotes about Johnny Carson, Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds, among others. And Parton cheerfully makes it clear she's no Dolly Two-shoes, admitting that she has run naked across Tom Jones's lawn, jettisoned her panties while singing on a swing and displayed her bare breasts on a restaurant platter.
But the best part focuses on her early years. She grew up in a family that was so poor her mother once had to perform homemade surgery to reattach Dolly's toes when she severed them on an old plowshare. Dolly writes about cuddling up with piglets and sucking on a sow's teats and about making a mandolin from abandoned piano wire. Early in her career, she survived by stealing leftover food from room-service trays in hotels.
The downside is that Parton makes a few too many jokes about her breasts. Far be it from this reviewer to get into a tasteless discussion of Parton's brassiere cups, which, by the way, are a size DD. Dolly may never rank stylistically with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but then Parton has better material. (HarperCollins $25)
by Kathleen Brady
If only Lucille Ball's life could have been as carefree as Lucy Ricardo's. But in this engaging biography, that madcap character often seems to exist solely to mock her creator's own thwarted dreams. Beginning with Ball's grim, lonely childhood in Upstate New York and continuing to her brittle, isolated old age, Brady paints a portrait of a woman far more complicated than even Lucy ever dreamed.
Her wild streak appeared early. Frisky and flamboyant, the teenage Lucy took up with a local gambler. Her passion to perform was so strong that, to keep her from running away, her family scraped to send her to a New York City drama school.
Nothing came easy for Lucy. More than 60 films and dozens of studio makeup artists, costumers and publicists could not make her a movie star. When she fell in love, it was with a world-class womanizer, Desi Arnaz, who would deprive her of dignity as he hardened her heart. She tried desperatelv to conceive during their marriage and suffered three miscarriages before becoming a mother at 39.
So it's hard to hate the later Lucy, a tyrant, lousy mother and a wife so frustrated by her husband's blatant disregard that she once hit Desi with a hammer and knocked him out cold. And always Brady offers the softer side: After her friend and mentor, director Ed Sedgwick, died, his widow came to depend on Lucy, "who cleaned her house, bought her clothes and supported her in old age."
In the end, the author suggests, Lucy and Desi "took emotional refuge in the Ricardos, whom they both recognized as people nicer than themselves." So will the reader, who will cherish the Arnazes nonetheless. (Hyperion, $24.95)
by James S. Kunen
On May 14, 1988, a Kentucky school bus struck by a pickup truck burst into flames and became the worst drunk-driving accident in the nation's history. Twenty-four children and three adults died. Two families, the Fairs and the Nunnallees, discovered that the fire was not so much the fault of a drunk driver as of the bus's poor design.
Kunen, a lawyer and former PEOPLE associate editor who originally reported the story for the magazine, has written a chilling account of their legal battle. The Fairs and Nunnallees learned that the Ford Motor Company, manufacturer of the bus's chassis, chose not to cover its fuel tank with a steel cage (a regulation that went into effect nine days after the bus was manufactured and might have prevented the fire). The company had found in previous suits that fighting litigants was more cost-effective than making safer vehicles.
Kunen documents Ford's longstanding reluctance to comply with mandatory safety regulations, re-creates the crash and examines the lives of its victims. Combining strong reporting with sensitive insight, Reckless Disregard is a powerful story that dramatizes the effect decisions made in corporate boardrooms have on everyday lives. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
by Vickie L. Bane and Lorenzo Benet
Fans of Danielle Steel's romantic concoctions will relish this unauthorized biography of the best-selling author. It's no wonder the woman has written so many books—she has a rich vein of experience to mine.
Steel, 47, grew up on New York City's tony Upper East Side, the daughter of an aristocratic German Jewish exile and his beautiful Portuguese wife. Steel's first husband (she's had four) was a scion of the Lazard investment banking family—but she soon left the marriage and Manhattan for a new life in San Francisco.
Determined to become a writer, she would work through the night, fall asleep at the typewriter and wake up with the imprint of the keys on her cheek. She also craved adventure and found plenty of it in a series of relationships with highly inappropriate men—including both a heroin addict and an ex-con who was arrested for rape during their affair. Husband No. 4, John Traina, seems to be a keeper.
The authors reveal that Steel often polishes up parts of her life and skips over the nastier bits when presenting herself for public consumption. Bane and Benet, both reporters for PEOPLE, have done an admirable job tapping important sources, including Steel's second husband, currently incarcerated in a Colorado prison.
Their sketch of the author is not all bad—she is shown to be a highly passionate and ambitious woman who has changed as her needs and life circumstances dictated. In other words, she's a lot like her heroines. (St. Martin's, $22.95)
>IN SEARCH OF DRACULA by Raymond T.
McNally and Radu Florescu (Houghton Mifflin, $14.95) First published in 1972, this revised bio of Vlad "the Impaler" Tepes includes recent discoveries from Bram Stoker's diaries.
COVENANT WITH THE VAMPIRE by Jeanne Kalogridis
(Delacorte, $19.95) This novel offers an original approach to the Dracula family chronicles. You don't have to like the characters to be interested in what happens to them.
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Elaine Kahn,
- Dick Teresi,
- Susan Toepfer,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Clare McHugh.
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!
