Word: novelistic
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...macro killers in Robin Cook's newest medical tingler. She must solve two mysteries: how an outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever (mortality rate more than 90%) got from Central Africa to the U.S., and why it only strikes staff and patients at clinics with prepaid health-care plans. Physician-Novelist Cook enjoys stretching credulity (in his previous blockbuster Coma, people were murdered to provide organs for the transplant trade). Here a league of conservative doctors plays with the viral equivalent of nuclear weapons in order to preserve its market share. The petit Dr. Blumenthal discovers the Hippocratic hypocrisy only after...
...They're here. Creatures from Out There, UFOs are invading the nation's bookstores. Moreover, these accounts of aliens are not sci-fi; they are on nonfiction shelves, and one has even climbed up the best-seller list. In 1985, according to Novelist Whitley Strieber (The Wolfen), small creatures with "fierce, limitless eyes" abducted him from his cottage in upstate New York and subjected him to painful prods and probes. Through hypnosis, Strieber later recalled more than a dozen similar occurrences. Credibility is dissipated when he remembers "being terrified as a little boy by an appearance of Mr. Peanut...
...Novelist Hugo's chase story between good and evil -- with good ironically represented by a runaway convict and evil by a zealot of a policeman -- has captivated audiences from the moment it was published in 1862. The original Paris press run of 7,000 copies sold out within 24 hours. Since then the combat between the virtuous thief Jean Valjean and the merciless detective Javert has been retold onstage and in at least 14 films. At heart, the novel's conflict is metaphysical: Valjean believes in the forgiving God of the New Testament, Javert in the retributive...
Rhodes, a novelist and social chronicler (Looking for America), has a firm hold on the fundamentals of nuclear physics. He describes the first millisecond of the atomic age in New Mexico with eerie precision: "The firing circuit closed; the X-unit discharged; the detonators at 32 detonation points simultaneously fired; they ignited the outer lens shells of Composition B; the detonation waves separately bulged, encountered inclusions of Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall...
...these very apercus are what mar the text. In adding to Defoe's repertory company, Coetzee has introduced urgencies that are neither fresh nor illumined, only brilliantly disguised. Flashing back and forward, scattering allusions, adopting a series of poses and styles, the author is less reminiscent of a prior novelist than of contemporary street mimes who build hints until the audience shouts in recognition. Readers of this achingly symbolic retelling are likely to give a similar response. But will they applaud the author -- or will they really be congratulating themselves...