Ciao Pauline!

Crane's View #1

by Jonathan Carroll

Sam Bayer è un autore di best seller che da un po' non riesce più a scrivere. Ma per il prossimo libro ha già intascato un anticipo stratosferico per cui è alla disperata ricerca dell'ispirazione. A riaccendere la sua immaginazione è una visita del tutto casuale alla sua cittadina natale: Crane's View. Qui rivede luoghi legati al suo passato, sfoglia ingialliti annuari del liceo, incontra vecchie conoscenze. Il viaggio si rivela una perfetta cura per le sue malinconie e Bayer si ritrova immerso nel mistero di un caso irrisolto di omicidio accaduto ai tempi della sua adolescenza, quello della fascinosa, giovane e scatenata Pauline Ostrova. Era stato proprio il giovane Sam a trovare quel corpo che galleggiava privo di vita nello specchio di mare.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Magical Realism, Crime, Thriller, Contemporary

251 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 1998

About the author

Jonathan Carroll (b. 1949) is an award-winning American author of modern fantasy and slipstream novels. His debut book, The Land of Laughs (1980), tells the story of a children’s author whose imagination has left the printed page and begun to influence reality. The book introduced several hallmarks of Carroll’s writing, including talking animals and worlds that straddle the thin line between reality and the surreal, a technique that has seen him compared to South American magical realists.

Outside the Dog Museum (1991) was named the best novel of the year by the British Fantasy Society, and has proven to be one of Carroll’s most popular works. Since then he has written the Crane’s View trilogy, Glass Soup (2005) and, most recently, The Ghost in Love (2008). His short stories have been collected in The Panic Hand (1995) and The Woman Who Married a Cloud (2012). He continues to live and write in Vienna.

Reviews

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was thinking between 3 or 4 stars but I ended giving it 4. Yes it was bit of disappointment but that doesn't mean it's a bad book. Wooden sea (third book in this series ) is one of my favourite books ever so it had nearly impossible expectations to live up to.

Unlike Wooden sea Kissing the beehive doesn't have supernatural/Sci-fi elements instead it's a murder mystery. What it has in common with it is that child/teenager we where vs adult we are now theme. When we stopped being one and started being another and what experiences separate the two.

One big plus for this book is that it adds more history to Franie McCabe who is awesome character even in this book.

[Hilary "Fox" · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kissing the Beehive is the first of the books in the Crane's View trilogy, the others being The Marriage of Sticks and The Wooden Sea. Unfortunately, I've been reading this books horribly out of order. I read The Wooden Sea first, and I've still not read Marriage of Sticks. Thankfully, they don't need to be read in order, although doing so appears to give Frannie McCabe (the protagonist in the last book) far more dimension.

Kissing the Beehive is much more realistic than most of Jonathan Carroll's books. I'm a bit baffled by others shelving it as magical realism or scifi, as the book lacked both of those facets for me. The book maintains a certain speculative hue, but it's a hue more covered by the mystery that the book is attempting to solve than anything else. There's nothing overtly fantastical within it that I can name offhand.

The book follows Samuel Bayer, a writer, as he decides to drudge up a decades old mystery for a new novel. When he was young he found the body of a girl, Pauline Ostrova, in the Hudson River; her boyfriend was convicted, but some don't believe he committed the crime. Throw in a mysterious femme fatale figure, and threatening notes appearing at each place he goes as he investigates.. and an interesting premise is set.

The book is dedicated to Stephen King, and one can easily see why if they've read his novella "The Body" or even It in some ways. The book deals heavily in identity and the experiences that shut us off from the children we once were. Nostalgia is almost a summery taste on the tongue, interspersed with the harsh cold of a delightfully creepy mystery more "Fatal Attraction" than "The Maltese Falcon." I'm happy to say, Kissing The Beehive was a book that I thoroughly enjoyed, even reading it out of order as I did.

[Elinor · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. My first book by this author, and it was a letdown. A writer returns to his home town to write a book about a cold case murder. In doing so he stirs up a hornet’s nest and attracts attention from the actual murderer. But I detested the main character. He hates his ex-wife, falls in lust with a deranged fan, treats his own daughter badly, and generally acts like the kind of guy that gives me an oh-oh feeling about five minutes after being introduced. The mystery itself was no great shakes either. I hate giving bad reviews because it reminds me that I wasted several hours of my life to find out what happened in the end, and then wishing I hadn’t bothered.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm about a third of the way through this and underwhelmed. The writing seems very pedestrian, and the protagonist comes across as a creep -- the way he talks about sex and women and his teenage daughter (he can't shut up about how pretty she is and his creepy possessiveness and hostility to her new boyfriend) and how he checked out the bod on the dead girl he found as a teenager is all very icky. Since it's a first-person narrative, I'm holding out a thin hope that this is intentional and that he is in fact SUPPOSED to sound like a creep, but I'm all too afraid that Carroll thinks this is just how guys are. Plus his exciting! new! love interest! is really obviously unstable to the point where he seems pretty moronic to not realize that she is bad news.

I've read other novels by Carroll and the prose was perfectly fine and he had interesting female characters and no particular ickiness in how men relate to them, so I don't know what is going on with this one.

Well, I've finished and nope, this one just pretty much sucked. The crazy girlfriend turns out to be a manic pixie dream girl on top of everything else. I lost track of how many times the protagonist told us about leering at some random woman on the street (and every woman in the novel is a hottie except for the folksy ethnic momma figure). Now I'm going back and questioning how I could have enjoyed The Teeth of Angels -- surely I wasn't delusional and it was much better than this?

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

why do you disappoint me so, jonathan carroll? i really felt that your books were special and beautiful, and then i go to the library and get this trite and misogynistic nonsense. i just checked out white apples. if it's not good, our relationship is over.

[Equiv0cal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Całkiem spoko, chociaż przedstawienie Veroniki w połączeniu z męską perspektywą trochę kłuje w oczy ://

[Anthony Cardenas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I started off reading this book thinking that I knew what it was about, only to finish it and realize that I had actually no clue as to what I actually read. I thought it was a non-fantasy Jonathan Carroll murder-mystery type of novel, much like Peter Straub's Blue Rose books Mystery and The Throat. As an admirer of Carroll's fantasy work, I have recently been delving into his non-fantasy work with great interest and an open mind. The first of these that i read was After Silence. I won't go into all my issues with that book (the full review is on Goodreads and Amazon), but suffice to say, that it was a dark, compelling book with some rather strange narrative flaws and a tendency to make the protagonist completely unsympathetic. Kissing The Beehiveis the second non-fantasy Carroll book that I've read, and I think i like it much better than After Silence, but it possesses some odd storytelling choices, which prevent me from actually loving it.

First, Jonathan Carroll's writing kicks ass. He's an amazing writer. His prose style and his spot-on characterization are a joy to read. The man can write. If you want to read some amazing books by this man, then I strongly suggest you read Bones of the Moon or The Land of Laughs or White Apples, which are amazing books and fill you with wonder, dread, and awe at this man's storytelling.

Kissing The Beehive is about a successful writer named Sam Beyer, who is facing a case of writer's block. When the opportunity arises to go back to his hometown and research the seemingly unsolved murder of a young girl named Pauline--the dead body of which Sam himself discovered in a lake when he was a kid--proves too juicy to pass up and so he begins a book about the solving of the case.

The story of the seemingly unsolved murder of a young, beautiful, self-destructive female stands alongside Stephen King's The Body, or Lynch's Twin Peaks or maybe even moreso James Ellroy's My Dark Places, all of which are works that focus on (obsess over?) a dead boy/girl/woman, which then haunts and influences the story, the characters and the protagonist/author. And I think if Carroll focused on that story, and the people directly involved, this would have been an incredibly tight and powerful book.

But unfortunately, in my opinion, Carroll made the mistake of introducing a peripheral character named Veronica Lake, who serves as the hero/protagonist's love interest, muse, and Girl Friday, but who maintains a mysterious past. This in and of itself isn't bad, in fact, it's quite the standard in the genre of murder mysteries, which this sort of falls into. Where the problem lies is in how the character of Veronica Lake seems to grow in power and influence, her strange and peculiar actions overshadowing the main murder mystery, the hero and his relationship with everybody else, and even pushes the book into some very weird territory. Imagine if Annie Bates in Misery was actually a hot, sexually inventive woman. The crazed-fan dynamic is different, of course, but the psychotic results are almost assuredly the same.

The book at this point no longer is about Pauline, the dead girl, but Veronica Lake, the weirdly sensual and very crazy girlfriend. The contest between the looney antics of the living girlfriend, and the subtle mysteries of the dead girl are frustrating, because you don't know who you want to win. It's a contest where the only loser is the reader, I think.

When I read Carroll's introduction where he articulated how personal the core of the story was to him, in that he actually did discover the dead body of a woman in a lake when he was a kid, I felt sure that the story would really delve into the psychology and emotional power of that strange and exciting experience. And it did, for a while. But when I got the end of the book, there was almost nothing of the dead girl. She had been effectively replaced in the story by the crazy girlfriend.

The ending of the book proved unsatisfying and, in fact, a little baffling. We learn the true nature of the book Sam has been working on and has now completed. This revelation, applied as a coda to the book, is both surprising and disappointing. In more ways than one.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following the publication of Jonathan Carroll’s last novel, From the Teeth of Angels, and his collection of short stories, The Panic Hand, the rumors were flying that Carroll was retiring. In interviews and personal comments, Carroll had made it clear that From the Teeth of Angels was the last novel in the “Answered Prayers” group of books. (That group, begun with Bones of the Moon, cannot rightly be called a series, because the stories, although inter-related, are not truly sequential.) When news of his latest book finally arrived, fans met it with relief, although there may have been some trepidation regarding what the book would actually be like.

The faithful should not have worried. Kissing the Beehive, while quite different in plot from all of his previous writing, is still vintage Carroll. It has everything we have come to expect from Carroll after ten books and as many short stories: a first person narrator, quirky characters, richly told details, scenes horrendous and wonderful. Kissing the Beehive has it all — except for the side-step into fantasy.

Bestselling author Sam Bayer has a fine career in writing thrillers, but something seems missing to him after all these years. For the first time, his words fall flat on the page. It is not writer’s block that plagues him, because he still types, the pages still fill up. But instead of the action and intrigue that drew readers into his previous books, he can tell that his new one is lacking any vitality. A chance occurrence reminds him of an instance from his childhood, when he found the body of a drowned woman in his small home town, and he decides to put aside his lifeless thriller and write the true story of the only murder his home town had ever seen.

Like Bayer, Carroll has shifted his genre. Instead of playing on the edge of reality that he had expertly done in his previous work, he keeps Kissing the Beehive firmly grounded. He draws from his own experience as an author to bring to life the author character of his novel, making comments on agents, editors, book tours, and fans that only someone with his experience could make. The prose is still wondrous, however; Carroll may have felt that he was burning out, but there is no evidence of that in these pages. Although fans of his previous work might find themselves continually anticipating strange and magical occurrences, Carroll makes a point in this book of showing that the magically strange occurs naturally in life.

[Metaphorosis · Rating 3 out of 5]

reviews.metaphorosis.com

2.5 stars

Struggling to overcome writer's block, Sam Bayer revisits his hometown, and is inspired to write about a murder he discovered as a child. A mysterious woman and some old friends help him to dig into a widening mystery.

I'm closing in on the conclusion that maybe I don't like Jonathan Carroll after all. It's a shame, because I now own a lot of his books. I bought a fair number of them a decade or two back, but my interest gradually waned. I bought a bunch more this year when I saw them on sale, and thought "Hey, I used to like that guy." It might have been better to trust my memory.

Kissing the Beehive is unusual for Carroll in that it's not really unusual. It's a story of crime in a small town that re-emerges years later. While there are suggestions of possible supernatural elements, the book as a whole is firmly grounded in reality in a way that most Carroll books are not. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a standard mystery/thriller that isn't really mysterious or thrilling. Carroll scatters red herrings with a will, but doesn't follow most of them up. It might have been a more interesting story if he did. Instead, the resolution is so mundane as to be unfulfilling. In some ways this book struck me as a rewrite of A Child Across the Sky, but without the magical realist elements. Perhaps its because he introduces both with the same story about finding a dead body when he was young. It was surely a striking moment, and reasonable that Carroll  would reuse it in several stories. But in neither book has he really made the most of that impact.

Carroll's narrator, a writer, spends a lot of his time telling stories, talking about stories, and listening to stories. I got the impression that many of these were stories Carroll himself had heard or experienced. Unfortunately, they don't contribute much to the novel, which begins to feel more like a collection of anecdotes than a narrative in itself. Perhaps that's because the core narrative simply isn't that interesting. Without Carroll's supernatural elements to cloak her, one of the key actors (a woman named Veronica Lake) simply comes across as bizarre.

Overall, a readable and inoffensive book, but not one I'd particularly recommend. If you're looking for the Carroll that you've heard about, try Land of Laughs instead.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in July 2003.

Most of Carroll's novels have fantastical elements - spirits, blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, and so on - even if they start out seemingly realist. Kissing the Beehive is an exception to this, and is thus less individual than Carroll's other novels. It lies more within the crime than the fantasy genre, though it has other elements.

The central character and narrator of Kissing the Beehive, Samuel Beyer, is himself a best-selling novelist, who at the beginning of the novel is suffering from writer's block. We seem to be about to have a novel about the ideas he has and discards, rather like Joseph Heller's Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man. He fairly quickly has an idea - he returns to the small New England town where he grew up, and begins to write about one of the most dramatic experiences of his childhood, when he and a friend found the body of a young woman while swimming in the creek. Again, Carroll confounds the expectations - the reader things that the remainder of Kissing the Beehive is to be some kind of voyage of self-discovery. In a way this is true, but the novel is far more complicated than that. When someone begins to kill the people Sam interviews, and starts leaving him taunting messages, we move partly into thriller territory. And then there is his relationship with a beautiful but obsessive fan - shades of Stephen King's Misery.

The magical commonplaces of Carroll's writing seems to be entirely absent; there are no talking dogs, ghosts of alternate realities. But the quality is still there; this is one of the best novels I have read all year.

[Micol Benimeo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Carroll says that the inspiration for this book is autobiographic: when he was a kid he found a dead girl’s body floating in the Hudson River. The girl in the book is Pauline Ostrova and the kid is Sam Bayer who, as an adult and a writer, returns to his birthplace to find the truth about Pauline’s death and find an inspiration for his new book. So the novel is basically an engaging detective story but written by Jonathan Carroll: the weird is always behind the corner. In this story there is no supernatural element but the weird is Veronica Lake, who becomes Sam’s lover and Sam’s nemesis too.
The book flows, is catchy, I really appreciated the considerations about adolescence and how it influences the person you have become. The relationship between Sam and his daughter is also well portrayed. The pages about the funeral of Mrs. Ostrova and Johnny Petangles’s song were my favourite.
Not Carroll as his best - the Veronica Lake affair becomes a little too much in the end - but it is worth to be read.

Even just for some writing like this:

‘She sounds like a haunted house. We’re all so optimistic and vain when it comes to romance. Convinced our love can exorcise their ghosts. But ghosts have forgotten about love. It’s not part of their world. The only thing they know is how to make you miserable.’

‘I was a terrible father for all the reasons I mentioned. I was like a dishonest shoe salesman with Edward. You know, the kind who assures you the shoes you’re trying on that are the wrong size will, by some miracle, fit beautifully as soon as you wear them around a while.’

[Marshall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely one of his best. I'd have given it six stars if I could. Unlike most of his other books, this one lacks even a whiff of the supernatural, and actually I think it works better than some of them. In many of Carroll's books, he is pondering the big ontological questions: life, death, love, meaning, existence. Here, he pares it down, focusing more on story than philosophy, and it works very, very well. The characters are among the most finely wrought I've ever had the pleasure to meet on the page and the story is nothing short of magnetic. This is a cracking good book, and I can see why David Lynch wanted to film it. That ship may have sailed but I'd love to see what David Fincher would do with it.

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not quite as big a disappointment as After Silence, but it came close. Carroll just doesn’t do as well when writing realism, obviously. I’ve noticed several other reviewers saying this book is misogynistic, and while I don’t totally agree, I can see why someone would say that. My assumption: he owed a book to his publisher, he’d just broken up with someone and was down on women, and he wrote this off the top of his head. Yet there are still scattered beautiful passages. Jonathan Carroll on a bad day is still worth reading. Kind of.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you've never read a book by Jonathan Carroll I would think this is a good one to start with. Less fantasy elements than others, more of a mystery that's a bit like the old show Twin Peaks, but without 'the owls are not what they seem' and 'black lodge' stuff. I don't know if it's as hard to find as it used to be, my copy is a British edition.

[Chris Browning · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know, I think this might be Carroll’s masterpiece? Certainly, like After Silence, it’s a book that uses the weight of his stylistic tendencies to lead the reader in a very particular direction of dread and horror and then suddenly explode those clues as misdirection. This is his most human and melancholy book since After Silence, but somehow richer because for once his skills as a writer are telling you the story absolutely straight. It’s an incredibly clever and sometimes beautiful novel, and one that uses the weight of his previous books to extraordinary effect. When Carroll looks humanity dead in the eye without any artifice (which I admit is an artifice I adore), his real genius rings even clearer than normal. Genuinely brilliant

[Joe Nuttall · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read somewhere that David Lynch wanted to adapt this into a screenplay. I would have stuck a toothpick under my toenail and then kicked a wall if it meant I got to see it.

Kissing the Beehive is one of Carroll's more grounded novels, ditching the supernatural entirely (at least for this novel in the trilogy) and developing a Lynchian murder mystery that I lost some decent sleep over. The hallmarks are all here; a mysterious and elusive woman found dead, an obsessive narrator struggling with their own problems that pre-date the fictive present, and a cast of strange and small town characters. I've read and seen a handful of these stories, yet they never get old.

This is not to say that Carroll has copied previous texts. Far from it. He crafts an interesting meta-narrative about subjectivities in creative nonfiction, filling the reader in on the subtext of Bayer's character as he writes the biography of Ostrova's murder. This definitely warrants a second reading, and I look forward to it.

Edit: Typo.

[Agnieszka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Po "Krainie Chichów" spodziewałam się czegoś znacznie lepszego. Owszem, język wciąż jest całkiem błyskotliwy i lektura przebiega błyskawicznie. Ale intryga... im dalej w las, tym bardziej odnosiłam wrażenie, że pisana na kolanie, postacie zaczęły się błąkać po kartkach bez większego sensu i logiki.

[Maja Cywińska · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[julkab · Rating 3 out of 5]

Przyjemnie się czytało, ale trochę nudna

[Freesiab BookishReview · Rating 5 out of 5]

JC has been a favorite author. I thought I’d do some rereading!

[Madzixczyta · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

[Marion Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.25 Stars

Jonathan Carroll has become an author on my must read list that includes Charles de Lint, Guy Gavriel Kay, & Jorge Amado. Carroll’s brand of contemporary fantasy and surrealism is unique to the fantasy genre. I have read and reviewed four other Carroll novels: White Apples, Glass Soup, The Land of Laughs, and The Wooden Sea previously.

Kissing the Beehive is the story of best-selling author Sam Bayer. Bayer is in a rut with his writing career and has not been able to deliver his latest novel to his publisher from which he received a huge advance. He visits his hometown of Crane’s View, New York for inspiration. Bayer learns of an unsolved murder case of a girl named Pauline that happened when he was a teenager.

He investigates the case with the help of a childhood friend, Frannie McCabe, the town’s police chief. As Sam delves deeper into the cold case, Pauline’s murderer reappears and endangers everyone close to him. Also, Bayer begins a new relationship with a fan named Veronica Lake. Lake claims to be his biggest fan and as the relationship deepens Sam learns the details about Veronica’s past connecting her to the murder.

Carroll resolves the story well enough, but I wanted more from the novel. Kissing The Beehive read like not having enough of a well-cooked meal you expected for awhile. There was more story left to be written in Kissing The Beehive. Even though, it is the first book of a trilogy; the novel was a complete story. Kissing the Beehive is my least favorite Jonathan Carroll novel I have reviewed. Recommended for Jonathan Carroll fans but newcomers should read The Wooden Sea or The Land of Laughs as a better representation of his unique stories.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This morning I was looking for something just to start reading, and I decided on Kissing the Beehive by Jonathan Carroll. I went a few pages and I just didn’t stop, I read until it was done. I think part of it was because for Carroll, it was such a strange book, strange in that it had absolutely no elements of magic realism. His books start out real enough, then all of a sudden the main character’s dog starts talking to a ghost, yet the talking dog and some ghost don’t make the story feel any less “real.” He writes with such confidence, the introduction of the weird is so matter-of-fact that you just accept, oh, of course, dogs talk… to ghosts. In Beehive, there’s a found corpse, a grouchy dog, but the corpse’s ghost doesn’t show up to have a conversation with the dog. Some odd things happen, you think, the dead girl’s coming back, just a few more pages… but no. I’m not saying it was a bad book, I was obviously engaged, I was simply surprised that it was really just a small town mystery. A solidly, sometimes beautifully written story about a thirty year-old small-town mystery.

At any rate, if you’re looking for an entertaining Sunday read, try Kissing the Beehive.

[Tracey · Rating 2 out of 5]

The main character is a writer who's feeling a bit museless.. until he decides to write about the murder of a hometown girl. He gets in touch with a childhood friend who is now the chief of police in his home town, and is pursued by/falls in love with a borderline obsessive fan of his.

Things are just starting to get interesting in his investigation... apparently someone else (possibly the murderer) is both helping and hindering the investigation, with deadly results.

[Natalie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Among other things, the protagonist was such a major league dope that it was hard to care about him. I kept picturing Red from That 70's Show saying, "Bad things happen to you because you're a dumbass." And why were there so many exclamation points? Everyone talks like this! About everything! All the time! Drove me nuts. I was planning on reading the entire trilogy--maybe the next one is better.

[Elena Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title alone is so weird it is compelling. The book reads like something Raymond Chandler would have written… on LSD. I have been a lifelong mystery reader, and have been surprised lately by books classified as “mysteries” that do not meet the criteria. In my observation, mystery stories fall into three categories: the sleuth who is smarter than the reader (Sherlock Holmes) and pulls the reader along as s/he unfurls the story; the dumb detective who lets the reader figure it out before he does (Inspector Clouseau); or the private eye who provides clues to the reader as the story goes along, teasing us to see if we can figure it out before the hero does (Charlotte and Thomas Pitt). Beehive does not fall into any of these three categories. Yes, there was a sense of mystery, but only in that the reader didn’t know what the heck was going on or discern how the author would resolve it. I had to do a little on-line research to figure out what the story style really was. What I found is called Slipstream – and my definition would be this: every plot point and character is something that could exist in reality, but the combination of events that make this story follows no logic. The writer can defy convention because there is no convention. In this book the main characters are wealthy yet have no evident jobs or source of income and therefore live in a child-like world filled with free time. I am a contextual person by nature, so the lack of anchoring to reality was, at times, jarring. But, because slipstream is in the literary genre, the writing style is engaging enough to make one ignore the “mysterious” classification. This book is an enjoyable read, and I would recommend it.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A writer returns to his home town to research the death of a teenage girl whose body he found in the lake. He's also being alternately seduced and repelled by a an alternately charming and alarming woman called Veronica Lake. He reconnects with an old friend, now the police chief, who is convinced that the boy who was convicted of the murder, and later died in prison, was innocent. He finds himself on twin overlapping rollercoasters - the search for the real killer, who appears to be sending him messages, and his disturbing relationship with Lake.

It's another Carroll with a fairly unlikeable character - albeit personable, complicated and mostly well-meaning. In this case it's like he never quite shook off adolescent stuff he seems to think he's put a lot of distance on, especially attitudes to women. Ironically, it's not the potentially dangerous obsession Lake has with him that puts him off, it's the way she has lead a pretty amazing life. So. I assume the misogyny comes from the character, not the author?

Good story though, good writing, no fantasy element, thugh with all the usual Carrolll stylistic hallmarks.

[Charles Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writer Sam Bayer is suffering from writer’s block. His work in progress—isn’t, so, remembering finding a dead woman floating in the Hudson River when he was 15, he decides to return to his hometown, investigate the case, and then write a book about it. Just before beginning his journey, he meets the enigmatic Veronica, a woman of many personalities, some loveable, some frightening, which adds to his angst as he begins to uncover secrets that have lain hidden for decades.
Kissing the Beehive by Jonathan Carroll weaves from start to finish like a river, languid and lazy on the flat terrain; tumultuous and frightening in the narrows, as Sam moves close and closer to the identity of the true killer. You won’t be able to put this book down, and I promise, the ending will knock you for a loop.

[Claudia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, this was such an interesting book!

A mystery in the past becomes a present mystery, an even more mysterious woman keeps popping up into Sam's life, and suddenly, life is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

What I really like about this book, aside from the main mystery, that was very cleverly done, were the characters. Sam, Veronica, Franny, Edward, Cass, even Johnny Petangles are remarkable, imperfect, human... You understand them, care about them, get angry at them.

Pauline and Junior have been dead for decades, but we see them through the eyes of those who knew them. They are complex, and in love and their story will affect the lives of many.

A very good read, I'll be reading more of this series :D

[denudatio_pulpae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muszę przyznać, że to jest specyficzna książka, jednak w żaden sposób nie jest to jej wada. Zaintrygował mnie pomysł wyjaśnienia zbrodni sprzed lat, która w pewnym sensie była dla głównego bohatera przełomowym momentem w życiu. Bardzo ciekawy był wątek z nie do końca zrównoważoną psychicznie Veronicą Lake, której postępowanie wprowadzało ten charakterystyczny klimat w książce: niepewności, duszności, trochę szaleństwa.
Zakończenie było zaskakujące chyba najbardziej przez swoją prostotę. Po jego przeczytaniu od razu przypomniało mi się stare powiedzenie mówiące, że "najciemniej jest zawsze pod latarnią".
6/10