Word: monsters
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...harmed by an irresistible beginning. Freddy's Book, Author John Gardner's eighth novel, is a case in point. While riding the lecture circuit in the Midwest, Professor Jack Winesap meets a strange old historian with a stranger pronouncement: "I have a son who's a monster." Winesap accepts an invitation to the man's house, arrives at an isolated and crumbling old estate during a blizzard, and is promptly snowed in for the night. After some suspenseful dawdling, the host allows his guest to visit Freddy, a young man who stands some 8 ft. tall...
...that is the end of the irresistible beginning. Freddy's mission is not to tear Winesap limb from limb or to discuss how it feels to be taken for a monster. Rather, he drops a bulky manuscript of his own composition inside the room and stomps off. The rest of Freddy 's Book is just that: Freddy's book. Gardner has used the device of a novel within a novel before, most successfully in his widely praised October Light (1976), but this time he refuses to provide the other half of the framing tale: Winesap, Freddy...
...monster hit," says Andrews...
...scientists finally persuade Simon, played flawlessly by the unflappable Alan Arkin, that he's an extraterrestrial who has come to save the world. But they turn him into a monster, whose ego expands exponentially, and who eventually acquires his own television station--Simon, the fourth network--commanding people to terminate their fondness for disco, Muzak in elevators, and other socially irritating habits...
Officials concede that the latest court action is unlikely to stop over-the-phone scams. Like some Hydraheaded monster, one get-rich-quick operation is no sooner closed down than another takes its place. Federal and state agents are usually one step behind boiler-room artists ready to sell to a gullible public. Says Attorney General Robert Abrams: "The same types of salesmen who brought us underwater land, worthless uranium stocks and phony gold certificates are in the process of perpetrating on the American public their latest scheme-oil futures contracts." A lawyer with the New York attorney general...