Warning: Blatant "Clubbiness" Ahead; Deal With It

I took a film class with Kevin Guilfoile when I was an undergrad; he was two years ahead of me at Notre Dame, just as Nicholas Sparks was two years ahead of him, and I was two years ahead of Ted Leo. So I can't really review Cast of Shadows--and I haven't picked up my copy of the latest Publishers Weekly yet, so I don't know too much of what got revealed about the story behind the book's cover. But I can steer you towards last Sunday's Chicago Tribune profile, which describes him as "a nice-guy talent who is some combination of James Thurber, Stephen King and Saint Francis."

It's also interesting to see how different reviewers find different hooks to discuss the novel, in which a scientist uses DNA from his daughter's murder scene to clone the killer with the aim of discovering who he is years later when he can figure out who the kid looks like. Cher Phillips (Independent Florida Alligator) leads with a reference to the British government's authorization of stem cell cloning (and a comparison to the new Kazuo Ishiguro novel); Art Winslow (Chicago Tribune) offers a thoughtful consideration of the domestic terrorists in the anti-abortion movement, which Guilfoile extrapolates into an anti-cloning movement in hisstory's near-futuristic setting.