Sliver Ira Levin

Sliver Ira Levin

Overview:

A HYPNOTIC STORY OF OBSESSION, SUSPENSE, AND STUNNING SURPRISES

Kay Norris, a successful single woman of thirty-nine, moves into the posh Carnegie Hill district of Manhattan's Upper East Side, into an apartment in a slender high rise, a "silver" building. A man watches her. He watches her unpack, watches her make her bed. He owns the building; a shocking secret is concealed within its brick and concrete.

Silver is a novel about ultimate power, and the temptations the use of that power brings. With ice cold precision, Levin the author of Rosemary's Baby and The Stepford Wives, creates a mesmerizing story that culminates in a scene of electrifying suspense.

''Horror High-Rise,'' screams a New York City tabloid's headline in Levin's ( Rosemary's Baby ) new fast-moving, made-for-TV-style thriller. A fashionable Upper East Side apartment building is the site of the fifth unlikely death in recent years, but new tenant Kay Norris, a divorced, chichi book editor originally from Wichita, Kan., is not overly worried. Nor is she fazed when her hot new boyfriend Pete Henderson confides that he is the building's low-profile owner, and that he has been spying on all the tenants for years using video cameras hidden in their apartments. ''Petey, it's wrong . . . it's something you have to put behind you,'' head-over-heels Kay implores this seductively charming psychopath. Dorothy, another displaced Kansan, showed more common sense in Oz than does this hapless heroine in the Big Apple. Kay physically resembles Pete's deceased mother, a famous old-time actress, a coincidence that links residents of the high-rise to a dark past. In a slam-bang finale, Kay is rescued by her cat, who has more vitality than this lame, formulaic tale. Literary Guild main selection.

Short, slick, and not up to snuff is the latest suspense thriller by the author of The Boys from Brazil ( LJ 4/15/76). Levin draws on his experience as a screen playwright during the Golden Age of Television to create hero Sam Yale, a down-and-out veteran TV director who lives in a ''sliver'' high rise in Manhattan's Carnegie Hill district. The novel's central character is Yale's neighbor, Kay Norris, an editor at a major publishing house. The young son of a famous soap actress owns their building and seems to know everything about his tenants, past and present--including several who met grisly deaths. When it's almost too late, Norris and Yale discover their demonic landlord's secret--that he watches real-life daytime (and nighttime) dramas with TV monitors he has placed in each apartment. It's contrived, but there are some surprising moments. Literary Guild main selection.-- Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.

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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!