Novels range from poignant to hilarious

Jesus as a boy
Much has been made of author Anne Rice's recent conversion. After spending years in the underworld, creating such characters as "The Vampire Lestat," the author has returned to Catholicism and says she now wants only to write for Jesus Christ. "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt" (Knopf, $26) is the first in a series of books Rice plans about Christ's life.

It's an ambitious undertaking, and Rice seems to have done her research. Unfortunately, the book is disappointing and dry. Rice's child Jesus is seven, old enough to perform miracles (on the first page, he kills a child bully, later resurrecting him). Yet he's the dullest person in the book. He's a blank slate, ignorant of his origins and unsure of his future. Much time is spent on family relationships and everyday life, and there are whole chapters when it's almost easy to forget that this well-meaning, boring boy is Jesus.

It's understandable that Christ as a child would be uninformed, would need to learn of his miraculous origins. But the book only brightens when another character — Christ's mother, Mary, or Joseph's older son, James — are relating these stories to Christ. When James unfolds the oh-so-familiar story of the Nativity, old hymns come to life. Perhaps Rice will pick up the pace in the next two books, as Christ grows up, but then again, those later-in-life stories are well-told in a certain Book that many homes already own.    —G.F.C.

War of the world
The real-life mystery of Flannan Isle, involving the unexplained disappearance of several lighthouse-keepers, has inspired a poem, an opera, and perhaps “Cold Skin,” this striking Spanish novel by Albert Sánchez Piñol (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $20) — which could also claim a familial relationship with the works of H.P. Lovecraft and George Romero.

An unnamed narrator, a “weather official” and disillusioned former revolutionary, takes a 12-month position measuring the winds at an outpost on a mile-long island near Antarctica.  He arrives to find the only structures are a lighthouse fortified with glass shards and wooden stakes, and the weather official’s cottage, ominously unoccupied by his predecessor. Gruner, the putative lighthouse-keeper, is hostile and borderline catatonic. The first evening, an elongated, sinewy arm reaches through the flap in the narrator’s front door and fumbles for the latch with webbed fingers. Thus begins the siege of the humanoid amphibians; no matter how many are felled, dozens more rise relentlessly from the sea each long night, battering at the walls.

The humans, who form an uneasy alliance with one another and a single outcast female creature they keep as a mascot, are blind to the fact that they are, in fact, the invaders on an already-occupied territory. In their efforts to survive, the two men plan to lay waste to a unique race and the length of the island, as genocide seems the only solution to their plight.  Piñol makes this allegory manifest a little late in the story, perhaps; the astute reader will be way ahead of his analogy to colonization.  In spite of this small weakness, the tale is as absorbing as it is horrifying.    —Kim Rollins

‘Prada’ redux
In her new novel “Everyone Worth Knowing” (Simon & Schuster; $24), Lauren Weisberger continues the meditation on status and brand recognition she began in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Where “Prada” focused on the artificialities and flamboyant characters of magazine publishing, “Everyone Worth Knowing” focuses on the artificialities and flamboyant characters of public relations.

Simon & Schuster

While Weisberger’s tale, about a former investment banker who lands at a PR firm, is engaging, it shares a critical flaw with “Prada.” Weisberger obviously wants to satirize a stereotypically Manhattanite focus on dropping the name of the right person, restaurant, or brand. But the book puzzlingly bogs down in a morass of references to everything upscale and painfully chic. What is intended to be a cutting narrative often feels like Weisberger is simply showing off how much she knows about what the rich and famous wear and eat and talk about. By the end of the book, you may be eager to never read another word about lush fabrics.

The characters in a Weisberger novel typically suffer from a complicated love-hate relationship with fame and glamour. Unfortunately, the breezy writing is weighted down by the fact that Weisberg obviously does, too.    —Linda Holmes

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