The Hunting Season

YOU DON'T GO ALONE INTO MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN Everything would be okay in the country, thought April Benard, in her new summer home. Here her children would be happy and safe. Here she could spend precious time with the man who had saved her life and given his love. Here she could further her career by researching a clan of remote hill people, an inbred society locked inside their own special, isolated world. Truly, she had nothing to fear in Mad River Mountain. Nothing, that is, until the creatures she considered safe to study stray from the dark woods. Creatures with stunted bodies and pumpkin faces, deformed in flesh and in spirit. Creatures with a hunger for cold vengeance. And a thirst for hot blood. Tourist season is over. The hunting season has begun.

From Publishers Weekly

Rather than the expected frisson of horror fiction, Coyne gives fans a novel with artificial crises and characters about whom he seems ambivalent, judging by their inconsistent behavior. The locale is a remote place in the Catskills where the natives are monstrously deformed after centuries of incestuous mating. They are the objects of research by anthropologist April Benard, who arrives from Manhattan with her husband Marshall and their offspring from earlier marriages. Supposedly the husband and wife are deeply in love but Marshall goes after women among the other estivating New Yorkers. As for April, she competes with her adolescent stepdaughter for attention from the Benards' handyman, lusty Luke. Switching among scenes of attempted rape, mutilation and murder, the story limps to a finale where April fights attacking "inbreds," led by their newly discovered kinsman. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Weiss's poetry is invariably sumptuous and elegant, a rich tapestry of verse forms and complex allusions drawn from the whole of European civilization. Here Weiss offers selections and revisions from nine previous books, plus new works. In general, one discerns a movement from mannered and discursive poems to lyrics that seem more spontaneous and conversational. A typical poem begins in mid-conversation with the reader. Always unique, Weiss is unfailingly musical: he hears the "zooming boom" of a bee and envisions turtles with "shells like painted shields." One of the significant poetry titles of the year; essential for all larger collections. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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