Be My Guest

A young woman rescues a boy who claims to be an adult trapped in a child's body, and Bud and Sis, two adopted chldren set out to find their real parents, descending into obsession, incest, and murder

The two novellas in this eighth book from Ingalls ( Mrs. Caliban , The Pearlkillers ) per usual style? depend less on outright fantasy than her previous works do, though her maverick imagination has supplied an intriguing premise for each of them. "Be My Guest" seems odd to call it title story when there are only two stories in book concerns a rather bland young woman, Sandra, who impulsively decides to marry a man with a spooky, eccentric son. Though Ingalls establishes Sandra as a closet romantic who is waiting for life to fulfill her dreams, she does not convince the reader that Sandra would let herself be swept precipitously into marriage even after discovering that her fiance was accused of killing his first wife. "Sis and Bud" chronicles the sibling protagonists' emotional trauma when they learn they were adopted. Alma and Bruce eventually seek out or 'seek out' their natural parents, but Bud's obsession with exacting revenge on the mother who abandoned him leads to an unconvincingly melodramatic denouement. Though carefully contructed and well thought-out, the stories are essentially inert. The characters' aberrant behavior is suitably explained, but not conveyed with the rising tension that Joyce Carol Oates, for example, brings to her works of psychological suspense. And the ambiguous endings of both tales are less provocatively teasing than frustrating.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Two novellas that, though more subdued than Ingalls's last collection (The End of Tragedy, 1989), show her as adept as ever at mixing the sinister and the commonplace to create psychological suspense. In Sis and Bud, Alma and Bruce are enjoying an ordinary American childhood, secure in the love of their decent if fuddy- duddy parents, Elton and Bess. When the kids turn 14, the parents tell them that they're adopted. Bruce is horrified, and determined to make his biological parents pay for their betrayal; but Alma is pleased, feeling free to love her dear brother in a new way (Bruce will have none of it). Time goes by. Bruce leaves his home, somewhere in the East, and tracks his birth mother to Kentucky. There, mother Joanna has a prosperous marriage and two grown daughters who Bruce (having ingratiated himself with the family) decides are ``too shallow to be hurt''; Joanna is his target. A climax involving incest and murder also reveals that Joanna wanted to pay back her own parents for their victimization of her; like mother, like son. In the title story, working-girl Sandra is a different kind of victim--not the captive of her genes but of romantic illusion. About to dump her insensitive boyfriend Bert, she is fair game for the first man who'll show her attention; and Roy Martinson seems like the perfect stranger, even if he's rumored to have killed his first wife and is the father of the exceedingly creepy Eric, who cut open his pet hamster ``to see what was inside.'' Roy proposes on their second date, and Sandra accepts, sustained by blind faith; but will it save her from these two operators? What's lacking here is the wildly inventive quality of Ingalls's best work--but, still, this is solid entertainment. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.