Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...this is only a warm-up exercise. The real work is promotion, which you should do for as many hours a day as your body can stand. But what if, after all that effort, the book is still headed for terminal inactivity on the remainder shelf? Hear now the tale of Callan Pinckney, whose deep-muscle-exercise regimen hit best-seller lists an unheard- of 14 months after it was published...
WHILE ANGELO'S language grows more insidious as the book progresses, the tales gain coherency. The first tale "Conquest" never rests upon any firm literary ground. The main characters Mr. de Moura and Sir Henry fade into one another. The narration slides betwee choppy dialogue and run-on unparagraphed pages shifting between business letters and unabashed seduction. At times the story simply disintegrates into what seems like a list of x-rated magazines or lubricants...
...Conquest" generates a potpourri of unstable images and dumps them disinterestedly on the reader's lap. The tale "Friday Night/Saturday Morning" continues with this lack of concern, though with more violent images. It stars four men who act as a death squad randomly mutilating strangers just for the hell of it. Clinical descriptions of gunshot wounds mingle with the grief of victims' relatives...
WITH COUNTLESS STORIES of recent labor union losses it is rare to find a group of employees unwavering in their demands. The setting for such a tale is Austin, Minnesota, where the country's most interesting and controversial labor battle is taking place...
Interspersed with this grisly tale, told in period prose, alternating chapters of the book unfold the somewhat grayer story of a 1980s police superintendent named Nicholas Hawksmoor. Another moody loner, Hawksmoor is investigating a series of murders at various 18th century churches, all built by Dyer (of whom he has never heard). The superintendent plunges into an intuitive pursuit in which he begins to identify with the killer. His prime suspect, often glimpsed around the churches, is the spectral figure of a derelict with a knack for drawing. Is it the ghost of Dyer? As Hawksmoor closes in, his overstrained...