Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual.
Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. There are a few funny lines, but it’s more straight-laced than you might expect.ĭespite a generous accolade from Discworld creator Terry Pratchett, who bestowed the inaugural Terry Pratchett Prize upon it, this zombie adventure inspires more gasps than laughs.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
The addition of a relentless, murderous spook named Alastair Brown only ratchets up the graphic horror. In one of many twists on the genre, the disease-which quickly spreads to all the other animal species-also inspires rather explicit lust as well as murderous rages. Lesley manages to ferret out the details of the story, while Terry discovers that his death-tinged aura is largely a product of his own anxiety. When a secretive plot to develop a bioweapon to disrupt the food chain goes awry, the motley crew must get nimble to unravel the story, outrace the predators and escape the island. To jump-start the lurching plot, Logan introduces ineffectual journalist Lesley McBrien, who is competing both with her nemesis Colin Drummond and the reputation of her war correspondent father. Even sadder is slaughterhouse veteran Terry Borders, who believes the stench of death upon him is driving away the ladies. Much of this Glasgow-based tale is seen through the eyes of British teen Geldof Peters, a boy saddled not only with the world’s most awkward given name, but also vegan hippie parents who foist things like hemp clothing upon him. He is, however, quite deliberate in the creation of his deeply disturbed cast. Scottish journalist Logan stays rather deadpan in his absurdist debut, even as the animals on which we depend turn the tables on us. “Two legs bad,” might be the borrowed motto of the titular monsters of this apocalyptic look at the end of the world-were the great beasts not busy trying to kill everybody.
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