Word: dead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg's 1986 update of The Fly and the best monkey movie...
...growing celebrity, not to mention the high-style hairdos and drop-dead outfits, often seems gratingly at odds with her down-to-earth TV image. And , there are Chicagoans who say that Oprah has forgotten her roots, that success has gone to her head. But she seems pleasantly unaffected by fame. Her conversation is a mix of calm self-assurance (one rarely hears an "uh" in Oprah's speech), erupting high spirits and down-home sass. She talks amiably to the fans who constantly recognize her on the street, and personally says goodbye to each member of the studio audience...
...satirizes the seemingly unsatirizable. After faltering in recent years, Westlake recoups in perhaps the most beguiling beheading of journalists since Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. The targets are the tabloid weeklies that feature UFO sightings, no-dieting diets and a "body in a box," that is, surreptitious photos of a dead celebrity in his casket. Rather than mock the already preposterous, Westlake explores the mentality that capable, rational people would need in order to crank out such stuff. In a particularly wry inversion of the norms of detective fiction, a young woman reporter bursts into the newsroom on her first...
...Haynes, an actor who, in portraying the Baker Street detective onstage, has developed an inflated sense of his celebrity and powers of deduction. The plot seems to have been inspired by the life of Howard Hughes: it involves both a plutocrat so reclusive that he is rumored to be dead and a daring literary forgery -- this time a "lost" Conan Doyle manuscript. Rendell has often said that she would prefer to concentrate on individual stories of twisted minds, but feels compelled by her fans to revive the suburban detective team of rumpled Reg Wexford and prissy Mike Burden. Having indulged...
...world, annotated with the operating locales of fictional detectives. Until this year, not much of note would have appeared next to the name Jerusalem. But it is there that Roger L. Simon's Moses Wine traverses the labyrinths of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in Raising the Dead (Villard; 228 pages; $15.95). Wine, an American Jew who combines pratfall vulnerability with foolhardy vigor, finds himself hired by Arabs to penetrate an organization much like the militant Jewish Defense League...