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| B08F4GYM8W
| 3.97
| 132,115
| Mar 02, 2021
| Mar 02, 2021
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liked it
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A young boy sees dead people. No, not THAT young boy, and Bruce Willis is not involved. Jamie Conklin seems like an ordinary kid being raised by his si A young boy sees dead people. No, not THAT young boy, and Bruce Willis is not involved. Jamie Conklin seems like an ordinary kid being raised by his single mother in New York during the late ‘00s, but Jamie has the gift/curse of being able to see and communicate with people who died recently. While it causes him to sometimes see the grisly aftermath of somebody’s demise, it also allows him to do things like help a grieving neighbor whose wife just died learn where she had left her wedding ring. Jamie’s mother has wisely told him not to talk about his ability, but when she desperately needs to talk to a dead man, Jamie is pressed into service. Unfortunately, Jamie’s mom also tells her girlfriend, a cop who doesn’t do things by the book, and when she gets into trouble on the job she wants Jamie’s help and won’t take no for an answer. Like the other times that Uncle Stevie has done a book for Hard Case Crime, this has a supernatural element and isn’t the kind of straight up hard boiled story they usually do. I also didn’t care much for King’s other recent books where he’s tried to blend thrillers with horror which left me fully prepared to dislike this one. So I was pleasantly surprised that I enjoyed it. For one thing, it is not The Sixth Sense rip-off that a quick plot summary makes it sound like, and King blends the supernatural with a crime story more naturally than he has in other things. It helps that it’s short, especially by Uncle Stevie standards, at less than 300 pages. Things move along at a brisk pace, and that makes it a solid page turner. He just had a cool idea for a story and banged it out with no padding to it at all. I was also pleased that King did such a nice job at writing it from Jamie’s point of view. It seems like he’s really struggled to write younger lead characters these days, and his protagonists who are supposed to be in their 30s or 40s often come across as elderly people. Writing kids is something King used to do really well, and it was nice to see that he still has that touch. This is one of those times that I really wish Goodreads let us do half stars because this would be the perfect example of a 3.5 for. Pretty good, a lot of fun, and well worth a look, but not quite great enough for a full 4. Overall, it was a nice reminder of the old Uncle Stevie magic even if it’s not going to make anyone forget about The Shining. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 22, 2021
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May 2021
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Apr 22, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1501180983
| 9781501180989
| 1501180983
| 4.01
| 326,637
| May 22, 2018
| May 22, 2018
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it was ok
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I’ve been reading Uncle Stevie for about 35 years now, and there’s been plenty of peaks and valleys in my fandom. This time out he found a whole new w
I’ve been reading Uncle Stevie for about 35 years now, and there’s been plenty of peaks and valleys in my fandom. This time out he found a whole new way to disappoint me. A young boy has been brutally murdered, and all the clues point directly at Terry Maitland. This is shocking because Terry is a happily married family man and all-around good guy whose coaching of youth sports has made him one of the most popular and respected people in town, and there’s never been the slightest hint of any kind of criminal behavior from him. However, with both forensic evidence and multiple witnesses there is no doubt that Terry abducted and killed this child so Detective Ralph Anderson has him arrested in the most public and humiliating way possible. The problem is that there was so much evidence pointing at Terry that Ralph didn’t bother nailing down his whereabouts when the crime was committed, and Terry has an iron clad alibi that makes it impossible for him to be the murderer. Yet for every piece of evidence that shows that Terry couldn’t have killed the boy there’s another equally damning one that positively shows that he must have done it. How could a man be in two places at once? The infuriating thing about this book is that the first half had a lot of promise. King seems to have been inspired by the Harlan Coben style of thrillers whose hooks generally revolve around circumstances that seem impossible. (In fact, Uncle Stevie even acknowledges this by actually having Coben himself be a plot point in the book.) And this works for a while as King builds up the scenario with an intriguing mix of clues and witnesses that both absolutely prove that Terry must be the murderer while also making it utterly impossible for him to have done it. There’s a huge problem with that though. When Harlan Coben writes his books the resolutions are based in reality, not the paranormal. So for each one he has to come up with a plot that leaves you scratching your head and then provide a solution to it that’s satisfying. What Uncle Stevie did here is to create the puzzle part which he adds layer after layer to it, but then he essentially just says “Oh, yeah. It was a supernatural monster. And now here’s a completely different book about trying to catch it.” You can certainly do a story that mixes police investigations with the unexplained. The X-Files is the obvious example of this, but that series would generally show us the weird stuff in the opening scene every week then they would try to unravel it for the rest of the episode. We all knew going in that the supernatural and aliens were on the table so there’s no point in spending time to make the viewer think there might be a non-fantastic answer even if Scully usually tried her best to find it. Since this is a Stephen King novel with a red-eyed monster on the cover a reader should know from the start that something spooky is in the mix. Yet, he gives us absolutely nothing about that angle for the first half of the book. He plays it straight like he’s writing a regular crime thriller, and he put in so much time and effort on it that he actually managed to make me forget at times that the ultimate answer would probably be a ghoul of some kind. So it’s like he’s teasing us that there is some kind of Sherlock Holmes style solution to this puzzle, and I found it incredibly unsatisfying when the supernatural stuff showed up to explain it all. The extra sad thing is that Uncle Stevie has done this plot before, and he did it better there. The Dark Half has a main character who is suspected of murder, there’s physical evidence showing he did it, and it’s only an airtight alibi that saves his ass. Yet, in that book we know from the jump what’s going on so it all flows together naturally, and it’s just one piece of a larger story rather than half a novel spent developing a mystery that is essentially not a mystery at all when you remember that you’re reading Stephen King. The second issue I had with this is that this is linked to the Mr. Mercedes trilogy. I didn’t care for those books, and if I’d have known that this had anything to do with them I wouldn’t have read it. I thought that series was done so to have a character from them show up at the half way point here as a surprise and then play a major role in the proceedings felt like false advertising. Another irritating aspect is that (And this has spoilers for End of Watch) (view spoiler)[ I found Bill Hodges in those books to be a reckless jackass who did nothing except get innocent people killed before he finally died himself. But the goddamn hero worship of him by Holly here made me nuts. He was a shitty detective and nothing special as a person. I’m glad he’s dead, and I didn’t need constant references to how awesome she thought he was. (hide spoiler)] At over 500 pages it’s also way too long with not enough happening except for a whole lot of yackity-yacking going on amongst characters. There’s a tremendous amount of repetition with people restating the facts about the initial problem of Terry being in two places in once, and then during the monster phase there’s endless jibber-jabber speculating about it. Dialogue has never been a particular strength of King’s, but all his worst habits are fully on display here so it’s extra bad that the book mostly consists of conversations. I also found myself nitpicking a lot of stuff here. Now that he’s over 70 years old Uncle Stevie seems to struggle writing younger people these days. Terry is described as being under 40 yet at one point his wife is remembering how they used to listen to Beatles albums in his college apartment, and she idly wonders if John Lennon was dead by then or not. A guy who is 40 today was born in 1978. John Lennon was murdered in 1980. So Lennon had been dead for almost two decades by the time Terry was in college. That’s the musing of an aging Baby Boomer, not someone under 50. Ralph also seems to be somewhere around 40 years old yet when he’s trying to figure out a restaurant name from a torn scrap of paper he has to go to his wife to have her run the internet search for him. I’m pretty sure that a detective whose job involves research and information gathering is capable of using Google. And it’s not even that Ralph is anti-tech or computer ignorant because he uses an iPad regularly through the book. Again, this seems like an older person’s way of thinking about the internet, not someone who would have been using computers since his first day with the police department. I also found the main break that finally gets the plot moving toward the supernatural stuff to be highly unlikely. (view spoiler)[Ralph has been in contact with the cops in Ohio about trying to track the stolen van that Terry supposedly got on a trip there. Yet, somehow even though a guy who works at the hospital Terry was visiting his father in was also accused of a high profile child murder, no one ever notices the link before Holly? Wasn’t Ralph supposedly working on tracking Terry’s movements in Ohio? You’d think he'd look for similar crimes as part of that, but he apparently doesn’t know how to use Google so maybe that explains it. (hide spoiler)] King tried doing plain thrillers with the first two Bill Hodges books, but he struggled mightily with plotting them so he threw in the towel with the third one where he went full-on supernatural again. This one feels like he thought he had a great idea for another crime novel, wasn’t really sure how to resolve it, started writing it anyway hoping he’d figure it out, and then when he couldn’t he just threw up his hands and made it all about a monster. I won’t be reading another crime based book by him. Unless he tricks me again. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 24, 2018
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Jun 11, 2018
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May 24, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 150116340X
| 9781501163401
| 150116340X
| 3.73
| 87,134
| Sep 26, 2017
| Sep 26, 2017
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liked it
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This is a review of a Stephen King (& Son) novel being posted on Halloween. SPPOOOOKKKKYYYY!! Eh….Not so much. Around the world all the women who fall a This is a review of a Stephen King (& Son) novel being posted on Halloween. SPPOOOOKKKKYYYY!! Eh….Not so much. Around the world all the women who fall asleep become enveloped by mysterious cocoons that form almost instantly once they go night-night, and they aren’t waking up. They’re still alive, but if anyone tries to cut or tear open a cocoon the lady inside will pop awake in a psychotic rage in which she’ll immediately try to murder anyone around and then will immediately fall asleep and be cocooned again. (I can relate because I also fly into a homicidal fury if awoken from a nap.) The small Appalachian town of Dooling is like everywhere else with the women struggling not to fall asleep, but as days pass the number of those awake begin to dwindle. Everything begins to fall apart as some men try to watch over the sleeping women they care for to protect them from jerkfaces who would do them harm. A lady named Evie is arrested for a horrific crime just as everything goes to hell and is locked up in the local women’s prison. Evie shows a supernatural awareness of the people and events around her, and it’s quickly obvious that she’s immune to what’s happening to all the other females. Meanwhile, the sleeping ladies find themselves someplace familiar but very different. The main idea here is pretty clever as hybrid of a fairy tale story and the beginning an apocalyptic end-of-society-as-we-know-it novel. Trying to get that mixture right is one of the places where I think the book falls down a bit because the more hardnosed elements where people are having to come to terms with what’s happening and prepare for the worst was more compelling than when it went deeper into the paranormal realm aspects of Evie. Yet that’s a vital component to the flip side of the book where we find out what’s going on with the women while they snooze which the book needs. So I’m left struggling to put my finger on why I didn’t like this more. Maybe the writing itself is a factor. With Uncle Stevie collaborating with Cousin Owen I wasn’t sure what to expect, and you can tell that this isn’t a Stephen King solo effort. It doesn’t feel exactly like one of his novels, but it’s not exactly unlike one either. Even his books co-written with Peter Straub felt more King-ish to me which seems odd. I listened to the audio version of this which included an interview with both authors at the end, and they talked about how instead of trading off chapters or sections that they would leave holes in the middle of what they wrote for the other to fill in a deliberate attempt to keep a reader from figuring out exactly who wrote what. Mission accomplished, but I’m not sure that made for the best book possible. Another interesting bit in that interview is that this started out as a potential TV series that they wrote some scripts for, and I think that shows through in some of the structure. There’s something that feels episodic about this although again I’m not able to explain exactly why that that is. It’s not all that different from any other book with multiple characters in different locations doing things, but I felt like there were moments when the credits were going to roll. It just reads like a TV show at times is the best way I can explain it. I’m sure some will be upset at the overall message here which is essentially that women are routinely fucked over by men, and that men overall are pretty awful. (Breaking News: That’s all true.) I admit that there were a few points where I found the male bashing a bit much, but not out of any nutjob MRA style faux indignation about double standards. It’s because I’m a cynic and a misanthrope so I’m fully committed to the belief that deep down all people, men and women, are pure garbage. So while I agree in general that women are less prone to violence as a solution and several other points the book makes I still don’t think that women would make a perfect world. Better? Probably. But not perfect. They’d just find more subtle ways to fuck things up. So for me the Kings’ idea that most women are saints who will always do the right thing that they present here was more wishful thinking than reality. It’s not a bad book. (Certainly its miles better than The Fireman, another novel written by a King offspring in which a strange disease puts society in peril.) It’s got a good core plot, interesting characters, and decent writing, but it’s too long and never quite gets into the top gear it was straining for. It’ll fall somewhere in the middle of my King rankings. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 06, 2017
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Oct 31, 2017
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Sep 27, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1501129740
| 9781501129742
| 1501129740
| 4.11
| 134,618
| Jun 07, 2016
| Jun 07, 2016
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liked it
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If I look at it as the glass being half-full then this is the best of the books King has done with the Bill Hodges character. On the other hand it’s s
If I look at it as the glass being half-full then this is the best of the books King has done with the Bill Hodges character. On the other hand it’s still pretty much a shoulder shrug of a three star read which tells you how little I thought of this trilogy so I’m pretty sure that cup is half-empty after all. Uncle Stevie tried his hand at doing a straight up crime thriller with Mr. Mercedes, but I found it to be a painful slog of poor plotting, uneven pacing, and a main character who came across as a reckless and irresponsible jackass. Finders Keepers had a pretty decent concept, but again it’s biggest flaw revolved around Hodges himself because he was almost completely irrelevant to the story which again highlighted that King struggles with mystery novels. Now here in the third book King has thrown in the towel on trying to write a straight-up action thriller/ detective story and gone back to his roots with a villain who has psychic and telekinetic abilities. By introducing spooky powers King doesn’t have to rely on trying to put together a logical chain of events that depend on characters reasonably deducing things or behaving rationally. Instead, he can have them following hunches and feelings, and the supernatural element keeps him from having to twist the plot into pretzels to make it all work. Like a lot of King novels most of the characters also seem to have an uncanny knack for guessing at what's happening elsewhere which seems more acceptable with all the bizarre stuff going on. As a Stephen King horror story by itself End of Watch would probably rank somewhere in the middle of his works. The problem is that it builds on the far weaker Mr. Mercedes as a foundation. Finders Keepers can be skipped, but it’s telling that you can bypass one-third of the story and still follow the major narrative. So what you end up with is a trilogy that started as a very flawed crime thriller, had a second book with zero impact on the main story, and then goes paranormal in the third act with only some minor hints dropped in the previous book that it’s coming. The only reason to like these three books being linked together is if King managed to make you love the main character, Bill Hodges, and his two assistants/friends. I didn’t. I mean, I really didn’t. When he wasn’t hiding critical evidence and inspiring a maniac to seek new levels of carnage Hodges came across as this bland, grandfatherly figure. Mostly he exists to ask tech questions of his younger colleagues who seem to look up to him for some reason. I never really buy him as a tough ex-cop, and he sure as hell isn’t a brilliant detective which is shown yet again here when the major breakthrough in this one comes from Hodges asking a very basic question that he failed to do in an earlier interview. Frankly, it’s a bad sign that my first reaction (view spoiler)[ to finding out that the Hodges has terminal cancer was relief that his recklessness and general incompetence wouldn’t be endangering the public any more. At last, his reign of terror has ended! Also, in three books Hodges is never once the guy who actually stops the main baddie during the final showdowns. So what purpose did he really serve? (hide spoiler)] King tries desperately to make the reader care about Hodges and his friends, but I’m left thinking that it would have been better for Uncle Stevie to just do this basic story as one book which could have been easily accomplished. Here's how. (view spoiler)[A cop stops a mass murderer and gives him brain damage in the process. After the cop has retired he hears about weird deaths surrounding the comatose patient and investigates. Hilarity ensues. (hide spoiler)] Finders Keepers also could have been a better stand-alone book without trying to cram it into this narrative. One other note of complaint: I doubt that King accepts product placement fees for his books, but I was really starting to wonder if MacDonald’s hadn’t paid him off when the first several pages feature an adult EMT completely losing his shit over the prospect of going through the drive-thru. This guy, who a few pages later will be portrayed as a clear headed hero in a crisis, has this gem of a line when he sees the yellow arcs of a MacDonald’s sign: ”The Golden Tits of America!” Classy. I guess I wouldn't turn down CPR from the guy if I had a heart attack, but I can only hope he's not too busy making boob jokes and doesn't have a hunk of half-chewed Egg McMuffin in his mouth if he gives me mouth-to-mouth. Overall, I found all three books underwhelming. It really should have been one or two good Stephen King novels vs. two-thirds of a very flawed crime trilogy that Uncle Stevie tried to salvage by going weird in the last one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 13, 2016
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Jun 19, 2016
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Jun 13, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1501111671
| 9781501111679
| 1501111671
| 3.92
| 63,060
| Nov 03, 2015
| Nov 03, 2015
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liked it
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Hey, it’s a collection of Stephen King stories out just in time for….Thanksgiving? Really, Scribner? You had a book from the master of modern horror i
Hey, it’s a collection of Stephen King stories out just in time for….Thanksgiving? Really, Scribner? You had a book from the master of modern horror in your pipeline and decided to release it three days after Halloween? I’m no marketing guru, but I think this may be a clue as to why the publishing industry is struggling so much these days. On to the review... Any long time Stephen King fan should be willing to admit that the man can shit the bed every once in awhile, and when he writes a real clunker of a novel then you’re stuck with that bad taste in your mouth until the next, hopefully better, one comes out. The great thing about reading a bunch of short stories from Uncle Stevie is that even when there’s a turd in the punch bowl you can just roll into the next one immediately and usually find something much better. That’s pretty much the case here in which the mixed bag of stories range from King at his wonky worst to some really strong character pieces on serious topics like aging, poverty, and morality. So while I might have been rolling my eyes at the ending of Mile 81 or the general goofiness of the villain in Bad Little Kid the mood only lasted until I hit one of the better ones like Afterlife or Herman Wouk Is Still Alive. A lot of the stories have echoes to other King works. Ur has a link to The Dark Tower series as well as more than a passing resemblance to 11/22/63. The evil car concept in Mile 81 is something else he’s done before in Christine and Trucks, and there’s a lot of From A Buick 8 in there. Obits shares some DNA with the Everything’s Eventual short story, too. But King has been doing this a long, long time so coming up with something totally new is like asking The Simpsons to find a job that Homer hasn’t already held. Mostly these are comforting echoes with enough upgrades and twists that you still feel like you’re getting something new in the guise of the familiar. Overall, it’s a solid collection, and there are as surprising number of stories with no supernatural elements. That may disappoint some King fans, but I found those to be the best ones. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 03, 2015
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Nov 16, 2015
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Oct 29, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1501100130
| 9781501100130
| 4.07
| 163,901
| Jun 02, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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it was ok
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The good news is that it isn’t as bad as Mr. Mercedes, and that there’s actually a halfway decent plot lurking in here. The bad news is that this make
The good news is that it isn’t as bad as Mr. Mercedes, and that there’s actually a halfway decent plot lurking in here. The bad news is that this makes it more clear than ever that Stephen King does horror a helluva lot better than he does crime thrillers. The story starts out with an acclaimed author named John Rothstein who pulled a J.D. Salinger and hasn’t published anything in decades. Morris Bellamy is a huge fan of Rothstein’s most famous creation, a disaffected rebel without a cause named Jimmy Gold, but he thinks that Rothstein ruined the character in the final book of a trilogy by having him become just another suburbanite working in advertising. Since this is occurring in the ‘70s, Morris can’t go on Goodreads to complain about it so instead he breaks into Rothstein’s house and murders him. He also takes over 160 notebooks filled with all the writing that Rothstein has done since quitting public life as well as over $20,000. Before Morris can read the notebooks, which include new material about his favorite character, he gets waylaid on another charge and sent to prison. For 35 years Morris dreams of getting out and reading the notebooks that he had hidden before being arrested. In 2009 a teenage boy named Peter Saubers and his family move into Morris’ old house. The Saubers have fallen on hard times after his father lost his real estate job in the market crash of ‘08 and then had the bad luck to get run over and badly injured while standing in line at a job fair. Pete stumbles across the notebooks and the cash, and he uses the money to help his family through their financial crisis. He also reads the notebooks which turn him into a nut for literature and another fan of Jimmy Gold. Several years pass, and Morris is released from prison which puts him on a collision course with Pete. That’s when retired police detective Bill Hodges gets involved along with his trusty assistants, Holly and Jerome. One thing that Stephen King knows how to do very well (Other than spoiling major character deaths on Game of Thrones via Twitter. Thanks again, Uncle Stevie…) is writing about books. He’s often examined them from both sides in his work: as the act of writing/creating and from the standpoint of being a fan of reading. King knows there something magical in both aspects, but in his world there’s also black magic. King has created what’s probably his own worst nightmare with Morris Bellamy, the fan who feels an ownership of a character and becomes violently angry when he feels like the author is mistreating him. There are shades of Annie Wilkes in this although the key difference is that Annie understood that her favorite character was a creation and wanted to control what happened to her while Morris sees Jimmy Gold as a real person that Rothstein has been a poor guardian of. This contrasts with Pete, the reader who is content to fall under the spell of an author and admire well-written things, and who feels guilty that he’s had to hide this literary treasure from the world in order to help his family. The book is at it’s best when it’s about these two as polar opposites because it isn’t just about the conflict and tension of who possesses the notebooks, it’s King writing about the love of reading. I did question the coincidence of Morris and Pete both growing up in the same house years apart and both being the kind of guys who will absolutely fall in love with a literary character like Jimmy Gold, but that’s a minor quibble. The real issues come when King tries to take this story and make it part of his on-going trilogy featuring Bill Hodges. I found Mr. Mercedes to be a mess, and Hodges was a big part of that as a hodge-podge (Pun intended.) of poorly conceived motivations and plot twists that made the character seem irresponsible and reckless. (Something that King even acknowledges in this one when Hodges reflects on his backstory and admits that he nearly got a bunch of people killed “by going Lone Ranger”.) He doesn’t do anything that egregious here, but the problem is that he is completely unnecessary. Hodges doesn’t even appear in the story until almost halfway through the book, and when he does the main plot comes to a screeching halt as King has to explain exactly who he and his friends are as well as the backstory of Mr. Mercedes. Then his only real contribution comes at the very end and could have easily been done by a new character. The main reason that Hodges is in this book at all seems to be to set up the third book, and there’s even an element at the end that feels like the bonus post-credits scene in a Marvel movie. In fact, the appearance of Hodges underlines that King, for all his vast storytelling talents, just really doesn’t have a handle on the kind of plotting and pacing required for a tense crime thriller. I’ve joked before that King has two speeds: dead slow and all-hell-breaks-loose. He very often can make that work, but it’s telling that a lot of his books take place over extended periods of time from weeks to months to years. King is at his best doing a slow burn, and there’s no question that he knows how to do suspense and a sense of dread in his usual kind of stories, However, he just has no natural feel for making that work in crime fiction. For example, this plot is structured around two characters, Morris and Pete, and the readers know their whole story and can see where the trains are going to collide. However, once he brings Hodges and his friends into the story, he tries to turn it into a mystery with them trying to solve the riddle of what Pete has been doing. As the action ramps up at the end, a big chunk of the story is Hodges trying to figure out what we already read so there’s absolutely no tension to it. A good thriller often has the hero trying to figure out something the reader knows, but there should be some kind of climatic pay off. Like some bit of info held back, the revelation of which should provide a satisfying A-HA! kind of breakthrough that is critical to driving the plot forward. (The pivotal clue in Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon is a great example of making this work.) But here we’ve just got Hodges putting together what we already know and trailing uselessly in the wake of the real action. King also sometimes has trouble with plotting when he can’t say that some supernatural force is helping push things along. There’s a great illustration of that here when Morris is trying to clean up a particularly nasty mess he’s made at one point, and he has every reason to remove a certain item. He even thinks that he should take it with him, but then he leaves it only because of a powerful hunch. Sure enough, he later has an opportunity to use that object to his advantage through events he could not have predicted, but the mere fact that it’s in the room shows that King decided to disregard the logic of the crime genre which dictate that you should always get rid of the evidence just to use it as a plot point later. Then to add insult to injury that object almost immediately become irrelevant after this twist which highlights how it wasn’t really necessary to begin with. So King introduced an element that he knew didn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t bother to come up with a convincing reason that it could have been logically kept in play, and then immediately dropped the whole thing so it was pointless anyhow. King himself has even gone on record in a recent interview about how he’s had a hard time with these books and doesn’t understand how mystery writers do it regularly. While I like that he gave something new a try, I also think that he’s just not suited to doing this genre, and that he’s usually at his best when he has some kind of fantastic element to lean on. (view spoiler)[The end of this one certainly make it appear that King himself has realized this and is throwing in the towel on this whole crime thriller thing to bring Brady Hartsfield back as a telekinetic villain. If that’s the case, if the first and third books are going to be centered on Hodges vs. Brady then this second book is going to seem even more like an interlude that really had nothing to do with the main story of the trilogy. Which would again beg the question of what Bill Hodges is doing in this book at all. (hide spoiler)] Also posted on Kemper's Book Blog. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 02, 2015
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Jun 06, 2015
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Jun 02, 2015
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ebook
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| 1476770387
| 9781476770383
| 1476770387
| 3.80
| 129,864
| Nov 11, 2014
| Nov 11, 2014
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really liked it
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From the synopsis on Stephen King’s website: "This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen Ki From the synopsis on Stephen King’s website: "This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written." That’s a bold statement that sets the bar very high for Revival. So does it clear it? Almost. I think. If it doesn’t then it comes damn close which still makes this a pretty impressive achievement for Uncle Steve at this point in his long career. Jamie Morton first meets Reverend Charles Jacobs when he’s a 6 year old kid in Maine during the early ‘60s. Jacobs is a popular minister with a pretty wife and infant son, and he loves fiddling with electrical gadgets. Jamie and Jacobs have a bond from the moment they meet that is cemented later when Jacobs aids a member of Jamie’s family. After a tragedy drives Jacobs out of town Jamie profoundly feels the loss, but time marches on. When he becomes a teenager Jamie discovers he has some musical talent and as an adult he makes a living as a rhythm guitar player in bar bands. But Jamie hasn’t seen the last of Jacobs as their paths cross again and again over the years and each strange encounter leaves Jamie increasingly worried about what Jacobs is up to. I’ve seen complaints from some readers that this is too slow and that the ending doesn’t live up to the hype. I can understand why. The readers’ impressions of it are probably going to be determined by how well the punch King spends the entire book setting us all up for landed. If it was a glancing blow, then you’ll shrug it off. After all, there are no evil clowns or haunted hotels or telekinetic teenagers getting buckets of pig blood dumped over them. The book could almost be one of those VH1 Behind the Music bios about Jamie Morton if King doesn’t pull off the last act for you. But if that punch lands solidly… If, like me, King catches you squarely with that jab of an ending, then you’re going to be lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling with a bloody nose and spitting broken teeth as you mumble, “The horror….the horror…” What made that ending so powerful? * (view spoiler)[ The idea that death is merely a doorway that has leads every person to a HP Lovecraft nightmare of an afterworld where all spend an eternity damned and enslaved is something that I’d think would the terrify everyone from the very religious to the skeptical atheist. Good or bad, believer or non-believer, we all end up in the same place. Death isn’t the gateway to the magical place where you’ll see grandma and all your pets again. It isn’t even a long dark dreamless sleep. It’s the start of a torment that will never end. And there is no escape from it. That’s the kind of idea that could make even a writer like Cormac McCarthy break into tears as he wails, “King, you went too far!” I think this has an extra jolt because Uncle Steve has never been shy about heaping misery on characters, but generally for him death is the end of it. Even in one of his other most disturbing books, Pet Semetary the message is that ‘Sometimes dead is better.’ Not this time. King wrote something where there is no safe harbor, no hope, no end… But I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords….. (Sorry, it had to be said.) (hide spoiler)] I’ll be thinking about this one for a while, and it could end fairly high in my personal ranking of King novels after some reflection. Probably not top five, but maybe top fifteen or even top ten. However, I think it’s got a serious chance of being the one I find the most disturbing of them all. * - Any comments about the ending that aren't hidden by a spoiler tag will be deleted. Sorry, but I don't want anyone who hasn't read it getting spoiled on this review. Also posted at Kemper's Book Blog. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 16, 2014
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Nov 23, 2014
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Nov 16, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1476754454
| 9781476754451
| 1476754454
| 4.02
| 335,221
| Jun 03, 2014
| Jun 03, 2014
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it was ok
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Warning! Some Stephen King fans (Of which I am one.) may be angered by this review and feel the need to tell me one or more of the following: 1) I miss Warning! Some Stephen King fans (Of which I am one.) may be angered by this review and feel the need to tell me one or more of the following: 1) I missed the point. 2) I haven’t written a best selling book and therefore have no right to be critical of someone who has. 3) I should quit being so nitpicky and just relax for gosh’s sake! 4) It’s called FICTION, not REALITY. Idiot! 5) I should burn in hell for all eternity for daring to impugn the honor of their favoritest author ever and this super awesome book! So to save us all a lot of aggravation, be aware that I’m going to be calling out Uncle Stevie for the what I consider to be the failings of this one. If you can’t handle reading someone being critical of an author or book you like and feel the need to make a comment in the spirit of what I’ve outlined above, I urge you to instead go find a review that liked the book instead of enlightening me as to how mortally offended you are that my opinion doesn’t match yours. And now back to your regularly scheduled book review of Mr. Mercedes…. In the midst of the economic meltdown going on in 2009 a bunch of desperate people looking for work are spending the night lined up outside the doors of a job fair so that they can be the first ones in when it opens. In the wee hours a maniac wearing a clown mask and driving a Mercedes suddenly plows into the crowd killing 8 people and injuring many more. A year later retired cop Bill Hodges is spending his days watching crappy afternoon TV shows as he occasionally looks down the barrel of a revolver. Hodges was the primary detective on the mass murder at the job fair, and his failure to catch the driver is one of his biggest regrets. After he receives a taunting letter from Mr. Mercedes he decides to pursue the killer himself rather than informing the police. Hodges is soon locked in a deadly battle of wits with the Mercedes killer who is a brilliant but troubled young man named Brady Hartsfield. This is a departure from King’s typical supernatural stories because it’s strictly a crime thriller of the type you’d expect more from somebody like a John Sandford than the Master of Horror. (It also made me wonder why he didn’t do something more like this for his Hard Case Crime offerings.) There’s even an indication made that this was not taking place in the extensive King multiverse when someone makes a comment about how the clown mask worn by Mr. Mercedes reminds him of a TV movie featuring a killer clown lurking in sewers which goes against the usual flow when even his newer books like 11/22/63 acknowledge It as being part of the same world. In the early stages I was excited about the prospect of King doing something off his usual beaten track, but there were a couple of major problems and a lot of minor details that left me more irritated than entertained. First and foremost is the issue that runs through the whole book in that Hodges knows he’s dealing with someone willing and capable of engaging in wholesale slaughter yet never seems to consider what twisting the tail of a rabid dog could do. Plus, if a thriller is going to set up some kind of mano e mano contest between it’s hero and villain then it needs to figure out some way to provide believable reasons as to why the fight has to remain between the two of them. Even though King goes to considerable efforts to try and rationalize why Hodges feels like he has to go after Mr. Mercedes without involving the cops, the results have varying degrees of success. When things start going sideways, and it’s made very plain what kind of danger Brady poses not only to Hodges but to other innocent people, to have Hodges continue to feel justified in not telling everything he knows to the cop makes him seem reckless and oblivious to the consequences even as King pays some lip service to the guilt that the retired cop is feeling. This could have worked better if he had played up the angle that Hodges had become an obsessive Ahab chasing his personal white whale, but King tries to keep his main character as a likeable white knight. That gets increasingly hard to buy into over the course of the book. It’s made clear by the supporting characters that assist him and willingly lie and break the law to help him without a second thought that we’re supposed to be rooting for Hodges, and that King wants us to think of him as a genuinely good person. By the time that the plot has been twisted into a pretzel with the effort to try and keep the fight between Brady and Hodges without making Hodges look criminally negligent, it’s increasingly hard to not be completely frustrated with him. This is especially bad at a climactic moment of the book. That’s all I can say without spoilers, but take the failure of Hodges actions and motivations, add in a plot hole, a glaring mistake by King and the biggest cliché in crime thrillers and it adds up to a book that feels like a wasted opportunity. You can read more about these, but I’ll be giving up the ending in the (view spoiler)[. The Insta-Love between Hodges and Janey is just beyond ridiculous. A good looking forty-something woman is going to fall head over heels for an overweight 65 year old guy who had some indirect involvement in causing her sister’s suicide? This seemed so unbelievable that I couldn’t believe King had incorporated the tired old trope of the main character having to hook up with a hot woman in a crime thriller. This gets turned on it’s head when Janey gets killed, but that’s when you realize that the romance was only there to try and provide another justification for Hodges to keep his fight with Brady personal. It’s the explosion that kills Janey that also makes Hodges’ actions indefensible for the rest of the book and blunt King’s effort to explain why it works out that way. Not spilling his guts to the cops immediately killed Hodges as a sympathetic character for me as well as straining credibility. I can’t believe that a guy is so bent on revenge for the murder of the true love he met a few days earlier that he’s willing to not tell every thing he knows about a mass murderer who just graduated to bombing and poses an immediate danger to an untold amount of people. When Hodges does decide to call in the cavalry, King introduces an immense arms bust that has all the cops so distracted that Hodges decides there’s no point in finally revealing what he knows. I’m calling a huge stinky pile of bullshit on that. I don’t care how splashy an arrest was just made, if Hodges called his old partner and confesses that he’s been in contact with Mr. Mercedes, that the killer blew up his car and that Hodges knows his name, I’m pretty sure the cops could peel some people loose to look for a high-profile mass murderer who just detonated a bomb on a city street that killed someone the previous day. It’s also inexplicable that Hodges wastes a huge amount of time trying to get in touch with one guy he bullshitted earlier after losing his number to a dead cell phone. King tries to turn this into tension by having Hodges stymied in his efforts to get through the arena automated phone system, but that completely ignores that HE HAS ANOTHER GODDAMN PHONE IN HIS HAND THAT HE IS USING! CALL 911 AND SAY THAT MR MERCEDES IS IN A CROWD WITH A BOMB AND THEY WILL GET IN TOUCH WITH ARENA SECURITY FOR SHIT’S SAKE! Then King tries to play it that only Hodges, Jerome and Holly can go in after Brady because they’re worried that he’ll set off the bomb so maybe you could argue that’s why he didn’t call 911. If that’s the case, why was Hodges so frantically trying to reach arena security? Were they going to be able to do something the cops couldn’t? There’s also a pretty big plot hole that made me wonder if King or an editor gave this more than one reread. Janey introduces Hodges to her family as a friend who worked for the area security company rather than the ex-cop who investigated the Mercedes killings and inadvertently helped cause her sister’s death. King even has Hodges telling them cop stories reframed as being from his security days. Yet after Janey’s death, none of them seem surprised to find out that he was a cop, and it‘s never mentioned again. That white lie should have blown up Hodges’ claims to the police that Janey’s death wasn’t connected to Mr. Mercedes. The mild punishment that Hodges receives at the end of the book really seem to gloss over the idea that maybe if he would have turned over the letter and not tried to goad Brady into a mistake that maybe Janey wouldn't have been killed, and he might not have even attempted the arena bombing. There’s another bit that’s not as glaring as these other problems, but it made me slightly nuts. The concert is supposed to be in an arena that holds 4000 people, and King writes this as if it’s an enormous concert filled with pre-teen girls. Yet, my local arena that hosts the kind of rock and pop acts of the same type mentioned in the book holds over 19,000 people and it’s considered on the smallish side. So it seems incongruous to have this fictional boy band breaking out a giant stage show for 4000 people, and everyone acting like it was the biggest concert since those damn dirty hippies stank up Woodstock. I don’t think One Direction would get out of bed to play a venue that size. One other complaint. While I liked the character of Holly, I also found her to be extremely similar to the new breed who uses their various social disorders to fight crime like Monk, Lisbeth Salander or Sonya Cross on FX’s The Bridge. (hide spoiler)] While I went into this one with high hopes and thought King crafted a creepy and plausible villain for an era where mass murder seems to be the new normal, I couldn’t believe that a supposedly respected former police man would behave like this. The effort to try to force the plot to make up for the gap between what a responsible person would do versus what Hodges does eventually made the whole thing a story that had me rolling my eyes or ready to yell in frustration. Sorry, Trudi... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 03, 2014
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Jun 07, 2014
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Jun 03, 2014
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Hardcover
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| 1476727651
| 9781476727653
| 1476727651
| 4.13
| 270,005
| Sep 24, 2013
| Sep 24, 2013
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liked it
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Remember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his d
Remember that psychic little kid in The Shining? Have you ever wondered what he’d be like as an adult after surviving a haunted hotel that drove his drunken father crazy and gave him a case of the redrums? If so, you’re in luck because Stephen King has now told us what happened to Danny Torrance, and he’s just as screwed up from his experience as you’d expect him to be. Like his father, Dan has grown up to be a bad tempered drunk, and he uses the booze to blot out his psychic powers as he drifts from town to town working menial jobs. The early part of the book focuses on Dan hitting bottom, and then trying to pull himself together with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. He winds up with a job as an orderly at a hospice where he earns the nickname of Doctor Sleep for his ability to provide an easier death for the patients. Dan becomes aware of a little girl named Abra with a shining ability that dwarfs his own, but unfortunately Abra has also come to the attention of group of vampire like creatures calling themselves the True Knot. They pretend to be humans who roam the country as a harmless pack of tourists in RVs while they track down and feed on the psychic energy collected from torturing children with the shining, and Abra would be like an all-you-can-eat buffet to them. This book is almost two separate stories. One is about Dan Torrance struggling to come to terms with the legacy of his father, his abilities and his alcoholism. The other is about the battle to save a little girl from a pack of vicious monsters. King does a decent job of trying to make these two tales intersect while revisiting some elements from The Shining, but it ends up feeling like less than the sum of its parts. Frankly, I was far more interested in Dan’s battle with the bottle than another Stephen King story about a child in danger from a supernatural threat. It’s not that Abra vs. the True Knot is bad. There’s a lot of genuinely creepy dread to be mined from a pack of psychic vampires roaming the country while posing as harmless middle aged farts, and King knows how to milk every drop out of that concept. And I liked the character of Abra a lot. The idea of a powerfully psychic young girl with a bit of a mean streak was great. Kinda like if Carrie White would have had decent parents and a happy childhood. In fact, Abra’s a little bit too powerful because she seems fully capable of kicking ass even during her first encounter with the True Knot. So while there’s a lot of nice build-up, most of what happens seems anti-climatic. (view spoiler)[ Abra and Dan pretty much settle the True Knot’s hash with only minor injuries to a supporting character and no real lasting damage. That just seems weird in a Stephen King novel which generally feature wholesale carnage and a lot more collateral damage from the bad guys. (hide spoiler)] Plus, while there’s some callbacks to The Shining, they mostly feel tacked on, as if King had this basic idea and then figured out ways to work in Dan’s history where he could. It’s not really organic and doesn’t seem necessary. I also think there’s a gaping plot hole in the True Knot’s key motivation to grab Abra and their scheme. (view spoiler)[ Supposedly the TKs have been around for a very long time, and yet it’s the measles they get from taking the steam from a kid that sickens them so that they think they need Abra because she’s been vaccinated. So in all their years of kid killing, including back in olden days of yore, they never snatched a kid with measles or chicken pox or polio or typhoid or something? And somehow all the children they’ve taken in modern times weren’t vaccinated against measles? None of this made a lot of sense to me. (hide spoiler)] One word of warning for those who have only seen the movie and not read the book, King is basing this on his version, not the film and there a couple of significant differences. (I got a laugh that King couldn’t resist taking yet another shot at the Kubrick adaptation in the author’s note afterwards. I don’t think he’s ever getting over his dislike of the movie.) Also, I listened to the audio version of this, and the narration by Will Patton is simply outstanding. I feared the idea of King returning to one of his best known works, but it turned out to be a remarkably solid effort with a lot of things I liked about it. I only wish that that I’d have found the rest of the book as compelling as finding out what kind of man the kid from the Overlook Hotel grew up to be. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 24, 2013
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Oct 2013
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Sep 24, 2013
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Hardcover
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| 1781162646
| 9781781162644
| 1781162646
| 3.93
| 163,920
| 2013
| Jun 2013
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liked it
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There’s a ghost that appears in the haunted house ride of an amusement park in the 1970s? Jinkies! Is this a Hard Case Crime book or an episode of Sco
There’s a ghost that appears in the haunted house ride of an amusement park in the 1970s? Jinkies! Is this a Hard Case Crime book or an episode of Scooby-Doo? Actually, it’s a Stephen King novel. And as we found out the last time Uncle Stevie wrote a book for the HCC line he doesn’t have a problem with blurring the line between crime and supernatural. Since HCC needs all the help it can get I’m pretty sure nobody bitched too much when he turned this one in. Devin Jones is a struggling college kid looking for a summer job in 1973, and he lands a position at Joyland, a third rate amusement park in North Carolina. Poor Devin gets dumped by his first love shortly after starting work, and he spends a good part of the summer brooding over his broken heart. But it’s not all bad. Devin enjoys the atmosphere at Joyland which is populated with colorful carnies who show him the ropes, and he manages to make some friends as well as develop a talent for entertaining kids. The park has a dark side in its haunted house where a young woman was once murdered, and her killer was never caught. Some claim to have seen her ghostly form. Zoinks! As a Stephen King story this is pretty good. It’s told from the perspective of older Devin looking back to a summer of his younger days and King has the melancholy tone of faded youth down cold. Devin’s a likable character, and the ghost in the spook house thing isn’t overdone. It mostly hangs in the background as Devin tries to get over being dumped and learning the carnie trade. It’s obvious that the behind-the-scenes stuff at the amusement park is the idea that King really got into and he even goes so far as to create a whole bunch of carnie lingo on top of the actual stuff he used. The early ‘70s setting gives the whole thing a bit of vintage charm although there are more than a few seemingly anachronistic tidbits. Were microwave ovens available and affordable enough then that a kindly landlady would have one? Were fruit smoothies a regular breakfast beverage back then? Wikipedia tells me that it’s possible, but it really doesn’t feel like they’d be commonplace. Plus, I really had a hard time believing that the owner is so forward thinking as to ban smoking in his amusement park. Devoted Hard Case Crime fans might grumble that this isn’t really a crime story. While Devin is fascinated by the ghost story and has a friend dig up some research on the murder for him there’s really no active effort by him to try and solve the case. It’s really more of a bittersweet coming of age story with a little murder and spooky happenings around the edges and providing a wrap-up. Still, it’s an entertaining tale in an off-beat setting with one of the most famous story tellers of our time. It’d be a great diversion to read while you’re standing in line to get on a rollercoaster. Also posted at Shelf Inflicted. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 07, 2013
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Jun 10, 2013
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Jun 07, 2013
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Paperback
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| 4.14
| 86,159
| Feb 21, 2012
| Apr 24, 2012
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did not like it
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Shenanigans! I cry shenanigans on Stephen King! King put me through years of mental torture with The Dark Tower series, but I was able to forgive once Shenanigans! I cry shenanigans on Stephen King! King put me through years of mental torture with The Dark Tower series, but I was able to forgive once he finally delivered a fitting ending to that saga. So I had a lot of concerns about him returning to the story of Roland. I worried that King had come down with a vicious case of Lucasitis that was going to have him tinkering with this story repeatedly. However, King’s public statements indicated that it would not change the core Dark Tower story and that it would just explore the long interlude between the fourth and fifth books. I’ve always had a big question regarding that since the end of Wizard & Glass had young Jake still being a new arrival to Mid-World and completely untrained as a gunslinger while Eddie and Susannah still had a lot to learn about carrying the heavy iron. When Wolves of the Calla picked up, all of them were stone cold bad asses after being on the path of the Beam for a good long while. It seemed like King was going to fill in that gap, and that was a story that I would have been interested in reading. I have to note here that Wizard & Glass is my least favorite of the Dark Tower books. This was mainly for three reasons: 1) After years of waiting, it didn’t advance the core story at all and instead focused on a flashback to young Roland. 2) It involved a long tale with a character who really didn’t have anything to do with DT after that book. 3) It was filled with fucking Wizard of Oz references. So what do we get in The Wind Through the Keyhole? 1) A flashback story to young Roland. 2) A flashback inside another flashback that tells a long tale about a character that has nothing to do with the rest of the DT story. 3) A couple of Wizard of Oz references. Adding insult to injury, the main reason I read this wasn't addressed. Even though it’s supposed to be shortly after the ending of the fourth book, Jake is suddenly carrying a gun and going off ahead of the others and no one is worried because “He can take care of himself.” WHEN?? WHEN THE FUCK DID THAT HAPPEN? BECAUSE AS FAR AS I KNOW HE’S STILL THE KID WHO GOT KIDNAPPED AND NEARLY KILLED IN LUD, YET A WEEK OR TWO LATER HE’S JUST A GODDAMN GUNSLINGER WITH ABSOLUTELY NO TRAINING!! *ahem* So instead of getting the one damn question I wanted answered in this, the gunslingers are used as a framing device for Roland to tell them a story about his past that turns into him telling some little bastard a tale about another little bastard wandering off into the woods. Seriously, this could have been a fun offshoot short story or stories in larger collections someday, but putting them in a hardback and calling them Dark Tower just seems like the worst kind of bait and switch. I’m going to sell this one to a used book store and pretend it doesn’t exist. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 2012
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May 10, 2012
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May 01, 2012
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Kindle Edition
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| 1451660804
| 9781451660807
| 1451660804
| 4.34
| 563,020
| Nov 08, 2011
| Nov 08, 2011
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really liked it
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Adventures in Time Mowing Dallas, Texas 11/22/63 “Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mow Adventures in Time Mowing Dallas, Texas 11/22/63 “Hey, you just appeared out of nowhere! How did you do that? And is that a laptop melted onto a lawn mower?” “Yeah. See there was this lightning strike and now I can use my time mower to visit the past and …. Wait a second. If you’re from 1963, how did you know what a laptop is? Oh, shit! You’re a time traveler, too?” “Yes, I am. What year are you from?” “2011. My name’s Kemper.” “No way! I’m from 2011, too. My name is George Amberson. I mean, it’s really Jake Epping. Amberson is the alias I’m using here in the past.” “Nice to meet you, Jake. So I assume you’re here for JFK and the …uh…event.” “Of course. You too?” “Yep. I thought I’d hang out by the grassy knoll, take a few pictures of the fence during the shooting and hopefully put this conspiracy bullshit to bed once and for all.” “You’re just going to watch? I’m here to stop it.” “Stop the JFK assassination? Oh, man. That old chestnut? Really? You‘re buying into that myth?” “What do you mean, Kemper?” “It’s the old baby boomer fantasy. ‘Oh, if only JFK had lived, everything would have been better. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam and the ‘60s wouldn’t have turned ugly and we’d all be living in paradise filled with puppies, unicorns and rainbows.’ Never mind that JFK was the guy who kicked off the really serious troop escalations into Vietnam and gave a wink and a nod to their army for the coup and assassination of the Diem brothers. It’s the Oliver Stone idea where JFK would have saved us from ourselves if only the Vast Conspiracy hadn’t killed him first.” “Oh, well, I guess we did think that saving JFK would make things much better, but we don’t think there’s a big conspiracy. I’m just here to stop Oswald.” “At least we agree on that. But are you sure you should be changing stuff in the past? That seems really dangerous and could cause all kinds of paradoxes. I just wander around and look at stuff, I don’t try to change anything. You don’t want to end up killing your own grandfather, do you? Or worse yet, accidentally become your own grandfather. Yuk!” “It should be fine. We did a few trial runs, and everything seemed OK.” “How did you do trial runs? In fact, how do you time travel? I don’t see a time mower around. And who is this ‘we’ you keep mentioning, Jake?” “I’m a high school English teacher from Maine. I have a friend named Al who found a kind of portal in time. We call it the rabbit hole. Every time you go through it, you wind up at the same day in our home town in 1958. Al went through the rabbit hole over and over for years and discovered that no matter how long you stay, when you go back through the portal, only two minutes have elapsed since you left.” “Didn’t Al end up with a bunch of versions of himself in 1958 then?” “No, because every time you go through the portal, history resets itself like you were never there the first time.” “Let me see if I understand this, Jake. So if your buddy Al went through the portal to 1958 and changed something like saved somebody’s life, and then he went back through to the present, the change would have been made. The person he saved was alive, but if he goes back through the portal to the past again, then everything resets to the original timeline and that person would die, unless Al saved them again, right?” “Exactly. But there’s a few odd things like you could go back and buy something like a hat. You could wear that hat back to the present, and it’d still be there. And you could go back to the past wearing that hat which resets everything, but when you went to the store you bought it from, the same hat would still be on your head and on the shelf at the same time! Isn’t that cool? It’s how Al was able to accumulate money and a few other items and still take them back to the past when he needed.” “That doesn’t sound….right. Jake, are you sure about this? I’m getting very nervous that you’re going to wipe me out of existence or something.” “I told you, Kemper, we did a few trial runs where we saved people from some ugly fates and then went back to the future and everything was fine.” “Still, you’re talking about saving a guy who is going to have a huge impact on history with no idea of how it will play out.” “Don’t worry, Al spent a lot of time thinking about this and doing research. He worked it all out.” “Let me guess. Al is a baby boomer, right?” “Uh…yeah.” “OK, so he talked you into doing this, right? He convinced you that everything would be peaches and gravy if JFK had lived, didn‘t he?” “Uh….kind of.” “Who is Al then? A physicist? A historian?” “Uh…no. He owns the local diner.” “He owns a diner?” “You see, the time portal he found was in his pantry.” “He’s a diner owner with a time portal in his pantry?” “Yes.” “If Al’s so convinced that this is the right thing to do, how come he didn’t do it himself?” “He tried. He came through and lived here several years while he watched Oswald. That‘s why neither of us just killed him. We wanted to be absolutely sure he was acting alone, but then Al got really sick and knew he wouldn’t be able to stop Oswald. So he went back to 2011 and told me about the rabbit hole.” “Oh, hell. I just realized that you had to live here for five years waiting for this moment. Damn, five years in the past must have sucked, Jake.” “Actually, I’ve gotten used to it. It was hard at first because I had to go back through and fix some things we’d done on our trial runs again. You know, because of the reset. I couldn’t stand to let those bad things happen. I had to spend some time in a really nasty town in Maine called Derry.” “Derry? I think I’ve heard of it.” “Really? It was a very ugly place in 1958. They had some child murders.” “Wow, that sounds really familiar for some reason.” “Anyhow, then I spent some time in Florida and then moved to a small town in Texas. I started teaching again and built up a whole life for myself as George Amberson. I really like it here in the past now. I’m thinking about trying to stay forever.” “But what about the segregation and the sexism and the second hand smoke and the lack of high-def television, Jake? Doesn’t that bother you?” “A little. But they have really good root beer in this time. And stuff is really cheap! I can buy a new car for peanuts.” “Nice to see that you don’t let a little thing like institutional racism ruin your appreciation of a good deal. Speaking of which, how did you make money? Just teaching?” “Al gave me some and he had a sheet of sporting events I could bet on to make more. Like I made a pretty penny betting on the Dallas Texans to beat Houston the other night. It was very cool to bet on the Cowboys before they were even the Cowboys.” “Uh…Jake, do you think the Dallas Texans became the Dallas Cowboys?” “Sure.” “That’s not right. The Texans were the AFL team started by Lamar Hunt. The NFL started the Cowboys in Dallas just to screw with him, and he eventually had to move the team to Kansas City and change their name to the Chiefs. The Cowboys were always the Cowboys.” “Really? Are you sure about that, Kemper?” “Yes, I’m goddamn sure about it, I’m from Kansas City. Jesus, you are scaring the shit out of me.” “Why?” “Why? Because you’re back in time screwing around doing stuff like betting football games when you have no idea what the hell you’re even really betting on. I hope to hell you know a lot more about the JFK assassination than you do about pro football.” “Not really.” “What??” “I told you, I was an English teacher, not history. I don’t really know much more than what I remember from my classes in college. I’ve got Al’s notes…” “The research done by the diner owner with the JFK obsession? That’s all you have to go on as you muck around with history, Jake? Did you at least bring some history books with you?” “Uh…” “Oh, you have got to be shitting me.” “We were pressed for time, Kemper!” “Pressed for time?? You said that Al spent years getting ready for this? And each time hop only takes you two minutes, right? You guys couldn’t have found twenty minutes to run into a damn library and check out an American history book?” “Well, in hindsight I guess that would have been a good idea.” “Ya think? I really wish you would have thought this through more than just doing a couple of test runs. You should have done that like twenty times. It would have taken you just forty minutes, right?” “It’s not that simple, Kemper. You see, for one thing, the time we spent in the past is still elapsed time. I started this when I was thirty-five, and if I go back, only two minutes will have passed in 2011, but I’ll still be forty. If something goes wrong now, I’d have to go back and do all of it again from 1958 on. I don’t think I can handle that.” “I hadn’t thought about that. I guess it’s like playing a video game with a really crappy system of save check points. The deeper you get into, the more you have to lose.” “Exactly, but it’s not just that. You see, the past does not want to be changed. If you try to revise something, it fights back. When we did our trial runs, it threw everything it could at us from car trouble to illness, and the bigger the event, the harder it tries to stop you. So doing a bunch of trial runs just isn’t very practical, Kemper.” “Summing up here: You’re an English teacher who was talked into trying to stop the JFK assassination via a time portal. You’ve spent years of your life doing this even though there’s clearly some very wonky elements to the resetting of the past when you go through and time itself seems to be working against you? And this seems like a good idea, Jake?” “Please don’t yell at me, Kemper. I did this with the best of intentions. It’s been very hard living like this, and the past seems to be trying to sabotage my life here now. I’m very tired and scared, and this is all coming to a head, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen …*sob*.” “Don’t cry. I’m sorry. It’s just…. This doesn’t seem like it was thought through very well, Jake. I mean, you seem like a nice guy. I’ll admit that it sounds like you have good intentions, but you know what the road to hell is paved with.” “I know, I know. But I’ve come too far to stop now.” “Yeah, I guess so. Good luck you poor bastard. Try not to break the space/time continuum.” ****************************************** Kemper’s Present Day Note About Stephen King and Kansas City Sports Errors (Or Are They?) The error where Jake thinks about the Dallas Texans someday becoming the Dallas Cowboys is actually in the book, but since it’s a first person account and Jake is definitely not a historical expert, it’s possible that King knew this and just meant for it to be Jake’s error.* (*Edit - Actually, I realized later on that even this doesn't make sense since the Cowboys and Texans were both formed in 1960. It was part of the rivalry between the NFL and old AFL. This was a big story in Dallas at the time and both teams did tons of promotions and advertising so it doesn't seem possible that Jake was somehow unaware of the existence of the Cowboys.) However, this isn’t the first time King has caused me to scratch my head with KC sports references. In The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, there is another oddity when the gunslingers are in an alternate version of Topeka, Kansas, that seems to be the one where King’s The Stand took place. There, they see a car with a bumper sticker that says Kansas City Monarchs instead of Kansas City Royals and this is supposed to be evidence that they’re in an alternate world. But the old Negro Leagues baseball team that had players like Satchel Paige was called the Monarchs, and you can still purchase Monarchs merchandise in KC today. (I’ve got a spiffy Monarchs hat I got at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.) These wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought for sure that they were just errors, but the fact that they’ve both involved a possibly unreliable narrator or hopping to alternate worlds leaves King some wiggle room that bugs me for some reason. Are they mistakes or is King just being cute? I. DON’T. KNOW. And that makes me nuts. Kemper’s Spoilerific Present Day Note About the Ending of 11/22/63 (view spoiler)[ You can tell from my little flight of fancy above that I’m not a big believer of the notion that JFK was some kind of awesome president who would have saved the country from Vietnam and the chaos of the ‘60s. When I heard the concept of this book, I worried that King was succumbing to a bad case of baby boomer JFKitis, and the early parts of the book seem to have confirmed this. Also, while I enjoyed the rabbit hole and reset the timeline rules, I thought the idea that you could bring objects back but they’d still exist in the reset past as a cheat and the kind of internal inconsistency that King allows in his work whenever it’s convenient to the story. I was greatly relieved that by the end of this book, King seemed to have set aside the rose colored JFK glasses and made that oddity about the objects part of a paradox instead of just a plot contrivance. (hide spoiler)] ...more |
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Nov 18, 2011
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Dec 02, 2011
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Nov 18, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 1439192561
| 9781439192566
| 1439192561
| 4.08
| 111,789
| 2011
| Nov 2010
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really liked it
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There’s a fair amount of criticism out there about Stephen King. A lot of it is valid, but there are certain times that he’s the perfect author to be
There’s a fair amount of criticism out there about Stephen King. A lot of it is valid, but there are certain times that he’s the perfect author to be reading. Like last night when a winter storm blew through. Freezing temperatures, snow, ice, and high winds made it look like an Artic wasteland outside. As I lay reading under my warm blankets, I paused for a moment and listened to the wind making the house creak and the sleet hitting the windows, and thought, “This is just about the perfect setting to be reading a Stephen King book.” The fact that it was a very damn good Stephen King book was an excellent bonus. As if to give us a break after recent high page count books like Under the Dome and Duma Key, King delivers four short-n-sweet novellas focusing on the nastier sides of people with just a hint of the supernatural. These are four tales about the lives we build that we tell ourselves our safe, sane and secure, but there’s always darkness lurking at the edges. King points out that sometimes we’re the ones who invite that darkness in. In 1922, a Depression-era farmer in the Midwest just wants to work with his son and read books in the evening, but his wife wants to sell some land her father left her to a hog factory and use the money to move to the city. When the two can’t reach an agreement, the farmer decides to murder her and hide the body in an old well. Even worse, he manipulates his son into helping. What results is a chilling story of the unintended consequences that one crime and the ensuing guilt can cause. Big Driver features Tess, an author who writes cozy mysteries about a group of elderly amateur female detectives that are popular with grandma-types. Taking a short cut home from a speaking/signing engagement, a flat tire leads to Tess being raped and left for dead. After escaping, Tess realizes that since she’s a quasi-celebrity going to the police would result in a media firestorm that would taint the rest of her life so she decides to seek her own revenge. Dave Streeter is a man with terminal cancer who gets a mysterious offer for fifteen more healthy years of life in Fair Extension, but he has to nominate someone to get a heaping dose of bad luck in his place. Since he’s got a lot of resentment and grudges against his best friend Tom and his perfect life, Streeter decides that his old buddy deserves some misfortune. The question in A Good Marriage is how well do you know your spouse? Darcy and Bob have been together 25 years and if things are a bit dull and ordinary at this point, they’ve built a good life and are generally content. When Bob’s away on business, Darcy goes looking for batteries in the garage and discovers a horrifying secret that her husband has been keeping. This is some of the best stuff that King has done in years. By focusing on human nature rather than supernatural monsters, he was able to create some very relatable yet scary stories. We know that we won’t really be trapped in old hotels filled with ghosts or live in a town overrun by vampires or chased by demon cars that drive themselves. But getting a flat tire on a lonely road? Finding a dark secret about a spouse? Being jealous of a friend doing better than yourself? Watching your life unravel because of a bad decision you’ve tried to hide? Those are things that we really fear, and King uses them all skillfully to deliver some of his creepiest stories yet. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 12, 2010
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Nov 01, 2010
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Hardcover
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| 1439148503
| 9781439148501
| 1439148503
| 3.92
| 306,028
| 2009
| Nov 10, 2009
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really liked it
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Here’s a nightmare scenario. A mysterious disaster occurs. The area is completely cut off from any outside help. Resources are limited. People are con
Here’s a nightmare scenario. A mysterious disaster occurs. The area is completely cut off from any outside help. Resources are limited. People are confused and scared. And Dick Cheney is in charge…. That terrifying idea is what makes Under the Dome one of the best books King has done. Chester’s Mill, Maine, is a typical Stephen King small town, filled with people both good and criminally insane. One fall day, a force-field crashes down around the area, causing a fair amount of carnage and disaster. The Dome is quickly found to be impenetrable, and while the townspeople can communicate with the outside world via cell phones or wireless internet, they’re essentially on their own. If the situation wasn’t bad enough, the town is now in the hands of Big Jim Rennie. Forget about Randall Flagg or Annie Wilkes or the Crimson King or Pennywise the Clown. Big Jim, a used car salesman and town selectman, is King’s scariest villain ever. Why? Because America lived through a Big Jim-like reign after 9/11, and it’s all too easy to picture how much worse it could have gotten while reading this book. King isn’t very subtle in the allegory here. Chester’s Mill is the stand-in for America, and Big Jim is obviously based on Cheney, a corrupt political weasel hiding behind the dim-witted first selectman of the town as a front to cover up his shenanigans. He doesn’t drink or smoke and talks about his love for Jesus, but Big Jim is utterly ruthless about destroying his enemies. And to Big Jim, just disagreeing with him makes you an enemy. Big Jim has spent years refusing to spend money on needed town improvements while involved in all kinds of criminal enterprises. While he demands total power and authority, he’s actually completely incompetent at leadership except for placing blame and manipulating people. When the Dome comes down, his first concern is covering up his criminal activity, but he quickly realizes that with the outside world at bay, he can create his own little dictatorship inside the bubble. And of course, he’s doing it for the good of the town. A small group of people realize what Rennie is doing and try to stop him, but they vastly overestimate what the threat of eventual punishment from the outside will do. They just can’t believe that anyone would actually go as far as Big Jim is prepared to do, and while the federal government tries in vain to assert its authority, Big Jim is all too happy to thumb his nose at them and continue to consolidate power even as the air inside the Dome is getting awfully stale. King’s always been terrific at depicting the strengths and weaknesses of a small town in books like ‘Salem’s Lot or Needful Things, but this is something different. He claims that he’s had the idea for this book since the mid-70s, but never completed it because the science of what would happen within the Dome was beyond him. Delay may have been a blessing, I don’t think this would have been the same book if it wasn’t for the Bush/Cheney administration after 9/11. It’s being routinely pointed out in various reviews that the plot here is eerily similar to The Simpson’s Movie where the government puts a giant dome over polluted Springfield. I’ve read an interview where King claims that he had no idea about this until the book was written and someone told him. I’m going to cry bullshit on that. He writes a column about pop culture for Entertainment Weekly and has played himself on the show. I find it really hard to believe that he somehow missed The Simpson’s Movie having a giant dome in it. It’s very weird that none of the people within the Dome ever mention the movie since King has never been shy about incorporating pop culture references before. But that’s nitpicking and doesn’t change the fact that this story and Big Jim scared the crap out of me. (I grew up in a small town, and I could easily think of some of the locals who would have tried to take over after a crisis if left unchecked, and some of them probably would have been worse than Big Jim and his crowd of hand-picked bullies.) Although this is a huge book and King has been bad about over-writing in the past, this one flies by and I actually found myself wanting a little more detail about some of the people since many of them don’t get much of a wrap up. I was a shade disappointed in the eventual explanation to the cause of the Dome, and how it is resolved, but overall, this is going to end up being one of my favorite Stephen King books. ...more |
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not set
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Nov 24, 2009
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Nov 17, 2009
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Hardcover
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| 4.08
| 195,993
| Dec 1978
| Apr 01, 1999
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really liked it
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I kind of blame Stephen King for reality television. That’s not fair because he certainly wasn't the first person to do stories about murderous games d I kind of blame Stephen King for reality television. That’s not fair because he certainly wasn't the first person to do stories about murderous games done as entertainment, and it’s not like he produced Survivor or Big Brother. However, two of the books he did under the Richard Bachman pen name before being outed are about death contests done to distract the masses in dystopian societies. So whenever I see an ad for those kinds of shows I can’t help but think that the people who make that trash read those books but saw them as great TV concepts rather than horrifying visions of the future. The scenario here is that 100 teenage boys volunteer to be part of an annual event called The Long Walk. The rules are simple. You start walking and keep up a speed of 4 miles per hour. If you fall below that pace you get a few warnings. If you don’t get back up to speed immediately, you get shot. Easier than checkers, right? Here’s the real rub: You absolutely cannot stop. All 100 boys walk until 99 of them are killed. Last one still teetering around on whatever is left of their feet then wins the ultimate prize. On the surface you could say that this concept that could seem silly or absurd. Why would anyone volunteer for this? Answering that question turns out to be one of the best parts of the book as King moves the walkers through stages while things get progressively worse for them on the road. What King tapped into here is that realization that deep down we all think we’re special, that things will always work out for us, and this is especially true when we’re teens with no real ideas about consequences and our own mortality. While the story focuses on one character it really becomes about all of the walkers, and we get to know them through their conversations and how they deal with the death that is literally nipping at their heels. Eventually the grim reality of their situation sets in, and we also view how the boys react to realizing the true horror they signed up for. We also learn a bit about the world they live in, and it’s an interesting minor aspect established in a few stray bits that this is essentially some kind of alternate history where World War II played out somewhat differently. I’d read this several times back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but hadn’t picked it up in the 21st century so it felt like there’s a dated element to the way that Long Walk functions. The boys essentially just show up in whatever clothes they have and they start walking with little fanfare. It almost seems like a contest at a county fair instead of something that captures the nation’s attention. There’s some explanation given about how they don’t want crowds or TV cameras around as distractions at the start until the walkers get settled into the routine. However, that doesn’t seem to fit with the idea that the event is being orchestrated as a distraction and weird kind of motivational tool. If the story were told now there would be a lot more about the media coverage, and the whole thing would probably have a corporate sponsor. Plus, the walkers would have matching shoes and uniforms designed to look cool and keep them walking longer. They’d also probably have a more sophisticated method than soldiers with rifles and stopwatches dispatching the lollygaggers, too. This doesn’t hurt the story at all, though. Instead it gives the whole thing a kind of dated charm like watching a movie from the ‘70s where everyone is smoking and people have to wait by the phone. One more note about Stephen King: The man really needs to have a spoiler warning branded on his forehead. I had to stop following him on Twitter after he spoiled major events on both Game of Thrones and Stranger Things. My friend Trudi had part of The Killer Inside Me ruined for her by King's introduction in which he described several key twists. I was listening to an audible version of this that had an intro from him talking about why he did the whole Richard Bachman thing. In it, he casually gives away the end of The Running Man novel. Fortunately for me I'd already read that one, but Uncle Stevie clearly just doesn't get the concept and why it pisses people off. Overall, The Long Walk held up to my memories of it as one of the better King books as well as having a chilling idea at the heart of it. Sure, some might say that the idea of contest that dehumanizes people for entertainment to make things easier for a fascist ruler is far-fetched. On the other hand, this TV show will be premiering a few days after a certain orange pile of human shaped garbage takes power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTNZr... It’s a Richard Bachman world, people. Get ready to walk. Or maybe run. ...more |
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1
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Dec 21, 2016
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Dec 28, 2016
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Jun 09, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0743211375
| 9780743211376
| 0743211375
| 3.48
| 70,679
| Sep 24, 2002
| Sep 24, 2002
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liked it
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You ever make a meal comprised only of a bunch of leftovers that don’t really match? That’s how you end up eating half a Salisbury steak with the swee
You ever make a meal comprised only of a bunch of leftovers that don’t really match? That’s how you end up eating half a Salisbury steak with the sweet-n-sour chicken from last night’s take-out. Stephen King loves doing that only it’s with books instead of food. Here we have a hunk of Christine served up with stray bits from The Tommyknockers, and it’s all done using one of his preferred methods of having a character tell a long rambling story. Uncle Stevie then seasons it up with a lot of wistful thoughts on days gone by. Call it King Casserole Surprise. The story here is told to the teenage son of a Pennsylvania State Police Trooper who was killed in the line of duty, and it’s about a strange car that his father impounded twenty years before. The car was abandoned at a gas station and at first glance was a 1954 Buick 8 Roadmaster in pristine condition, but closer examination shows a lot of odd things that indicate the car isn’t a car at all. After one of their troopers disappears they all believe that the Buick is somehow responsible, and they decide to keep the car stashed in a shed at their headquarters. Supposedly it’s to protect the public, but there’s also a healthy amount of curiosity that turns into near obsession on the part of some of the troopers including the dead boy’s father who spends the next two decades trying to unravel the secret of the Buick. This is not one of King’s best books, and one of the biggest problems is that he tries to have it both ways. A large point of the story is supposed to be that there are some mysteries that we’ll just never solve, and that we have to make peace with that when we run across it. Which is fine, but if you’re going to play it that way then the mystery of the Buick needs to really be unknowable. What King does instead is to beat us over the head with that theme of acceptance, but then he pretty much goes ahead and tells us what the car is anyhow. Plus, the weird things the Buick does get fairly predictable. Yeah, I know, that’s part of the point. The story makes it clear that the car and it’s occasional crazy happening became just part of the routine for everyone who knew it was back there, but then King has to have it unleash unspeakable horrors a couple of times which make it hard to believe that anyone could just go to work every day knowing it was back there instead of just being an oddity they deal with once in a while. The cops also seem to take the disappearance of one of their own fairly lightly. While this comes in at a relatively tight 350 pages for a later work by Uncle Stevie it just doesn’t feel like there’s enough story here to justify it. As it stands it would have made a better short story or novella, but at this length it feels like there’s both too much and not enough at the same time. Despite all my misgivings I kinda like this one, but it’s for mainly personal reasons. My mother worked as a dispatcher for the sheriff’s department of our rural Kansas county when I was growing up, and their office was just a block away from my grandmother’s house who would watch us when the folks were working. I spent a lot of time hanging around there, and this book, which details the humdrum everyday stuff that happens around any cop shop, reminds me of those times when I’d sit in their kitchen listening to the chatter of the guys in the office and on the radio. So it’s pure nostalgia that gets me to boost this from two stars to three. I make no apologies for that. ...more |
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1
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Jan 16, 2017
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Jan 26, 2017
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Jun 09, 2009
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Hardcover
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| 1416552510
| 9781416552512
| 1416552510
| 3.98
| 127,005
| Jan 22, 2008
| Jan 22, 2008
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liked it
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And this is why adults shouldn’t play with dolls… Edgar Freemantle used to be the quintessential American success story. He was a self-made millionaire And this is why adults shouldn’t play with dolls… Edgar Freemantle used to be the quintessential American success story. He was a self-made millionaire who built a thriving construction business, and he had a long and happy marriage which produced two daughters. However, Edgar’s good luck ran out one day when he had a brutal run in with a crane at a job site that cost him an arm, screwed up a leg, and cracked his skull. The brain trauma left his eggs slightly scrambled and made him prone to fly into furious rages that his wife couldn't endure so the accident also ends his marriage. While trying to recover from his injuries and the divorce Edgar decides to relocate to Florida and indulge in his long dormant hobby of drawing and painting pictures. Edgar rents a house at isolated Duma Key on the Gulf Coast where the gorgeous views and long walks on the beach inspire him to amazing artistic achievements and a rapid recovery of his health. In fact, Edgar’s progress in both areas could be termed as too good to be true if not downright spooky. I read this for the first time shortly after it was originally released in 2008, and at that time I was intrigued by the story of a damaged man turning to art to heal his body and mind which is a subject that King has intimate knowledge of after being run down by a car. (King wrote movingly about it in the non-fiction On Writing.) However, I found the supernatural stuff lacking, and I’d kinda wished that King had written just a straight up character piece about a guy discovering a latent talent following a tragedy. Since then I’ve seen what happens when King tries his hand at a non-horror genre piece (Mr. Mercedes) so I no longer think that would have been a good idea. Overall, I found myself more intrigued this time by the supernatural aspects and less enamored of the story about Edgar’s recovery and development as a painter. This is probably because I’ve find myself more sensitive to the tics of his that I dislike which this has several of. First is that there’s a general lack of focus. King has always been willing to throw the kitchen sink at a reader, but he really seemed particularly unwilling or unable to pick a path and stick to it here. There’s elements you see from other stories like Dead Zone with a brain injury leading to weird abilities and there’s the ghost story in an isolated locale like The Shining as well as bits and pieces from other King works. All of this leads to the typical case of King bloat where it seems like a couple of hundred pages could have easily been shaved from the finished product. The character of Wireman is a prime example of something else I’ve grown irritated with in King’s work where he creates wise and quirky characters and then fills their mouths with overblown dialogue. Here, Wireman frequently refers to himself in the third person, sprinkles his conversations with Spanish jargon, and he’s full of meaningless sayings that are treated as profound by Edgar. Seriously, if someone ever told me, “Do the day, muchacho! And let the day do you!” then I’m going to flip them off and walk away. Which is a shame because there was much about Wireman in this best friend role other than the way he constantly expressed himself that I really liked. Another King trope that has increasingly irked me in recent years in his habit of creating situations where the characters are fighting the clock but then waste huge amounts of time talking instead of acting. In this one there’s a point near the end where hell is gonna be unleashed at sunset which is coming fast, and yet Edgar feels that’s the ideal time to sit the other characters down and tell them a long rambling story about what he’s discovered. And then of course they find themselves screwed at sunset. How about for once you let them get the job done and save story time for afterwards, Uncle Stevie? However, despite these gripes I did enjoy this book. King hits the melancholy tone of Edgar, a middle-aged man with a broken home and broken body, perfectly. Doing one of his stories on a bright Florida beach rather than the spooky Maine woods was a nice change of pace, and it fits the way that there’s an underlying tension to all of it. There’s also an extremely wicked irony at play here in that most of the stuff happening seems like a good thing rather than evil. Edgar is healing and he’s creating amazing art, and he even uses his newfound abilities to do some good. You can see how he’s willing to push aside any warning signs because so much of what is happening to him is legitimately changing his life for the better without any of the usual dark down side you’d immediately see in most horror books. It’s not quite as good as I found it in 2008, but it’s still one of the better later era King novels. ...more |
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Oct 14, 2016
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Oct 25, 2016
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Jul 02, 2008
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Hardcover
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| 0399133143
| 9780399133145
| 0399133143
| 3.60
| 155,816
| Nov 10, 1987
| Nov 10, 1987
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it was ok
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I mean, The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said
I mean, The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there." - Stephen King in a Rolling Stone interview. You got that right, Uncle Stevie. Bobbi Anderson is a writer living outside a small Maine town who trips over a hunk of metal sticking out of the ground while walking in the woods with her dog. She finds herself strangely compelled to dig it up, and she soon realizes that she’s stumbled across a flying saucer that has been buried for thousands of years. Bobbi’s friend Jim Gardner is a poet with a love of booze and a deep hatred of nuclear power. After going on an epic bender Gardner visits Bobbi and finds that she has worked herself ragged and lost several teeth while digging up the ship. She’s also started making all sorts of home improvements like fixing her aging water heater up with what appears to be a fusion reactor. Bobbi convinces Gardner that they need to excavate the ship themselves, and he agrees to help. But the ship’s influence grows as it is unearthed to the point where the nearby townsfolk also start spitting teeth and coming up with clever ideas of their own. The King quote I led with really sums up this book. There’s an intriguing idea at the heart of it and some nice character stuff particularly when it comes to Gardner. However, its coke-fueled writing is so evident that you expect to see leftover powder and dried blood spots from King’s nose on every page. There’s just too many tangents that go in useless directions, and it really gets out of control when he starts telling all the stories happening in the nearby town of Haven. Detailing the takeover of the population of a small town via snapshots of the locals is something King does well in other books like Salem’s Lot, but he could never draw the line here between relevant character details and useless information. In fact, it almost seems at times like he was starting different novels. One has a beloved civic leader coming to suspect that there is something very wrong happening and doing her best to hold out from it. Another has a reporter starting to unravel the mystery of what happens in Haven, but since all he is doing is uncovering what we already know his whole thread is pretty much useless anyhow so learning all about his relationship with his passive aggressive mother is especially pointless. King also has problems in dealing with things logically from a plot standpoint. He prefers vague supernatural threats that he can routinely increase or reduce the powers of as needed, but when he has to put physical rules to them things fly apart. Here he can’t even nail down exactly how the Tommyknockers are transforming the people. It’s definitely a gas that seems to come off the skin of the ship as it’s exposed. That’s a good concept (Although why aliens would coat the outside of their ship with something that would spread on contact with Earth air is a valid question.) but the ship also exudes something akin to electromagnetism that effects electronics and radio waves. You could make the argument that there’s no reason it can’t be pumping out both gas and some weird alien radiation. Which is true, but it gets messy when it comes exactly which thing is doing what, and King practically broke his back trying to draw parallels to the TK ship and nuclear reactors so that theme is clear. However, Gardner is immune to the Tommyknocker transformation because he has a metal plate in his head so that seems to indicate that it isn’t caused by the gas, but it is repeatedly shown that others can avoid its effects by not breathing the air. It just isn't consistent at all. There is also a whopper of a continuity error right at the heart of this that shows that King wasn’t thinking through the details. (view spoiler)[A huge deal is made out of how the sling that lowers Gardner and Bobbi into the excavation pit requires one person to be up top to operate it, and that element plays a pivotal part in the climax. Yet at the moment when they reach the hatch both of them are down in the hole at the same time with no one else around. Oops (hide spoiler)] He also didn’t think through the implications of including the usual Easter eggs to his other works. The town of Derry exists here along with a direct reference to IT as well as other books, and that seems harmless enough at first. However, the end of this one would literally be the biggest story in human history. So that means the Stephen King universe should include it and the aftermath, but it doesn’t. Yeah, yeah, I know. The Dark Tower has many levels, blah, blah, blah. You can believe that if you want, but it increasingly feels to me that the references aren't so much clever winks to reader as they are lazy tricks that undermine the story King is trying to tell at the moment. Plus, Stephen King just plain sucks at writing about aliens. He proved it again in Dreamcatcher, and if you read that whole interview I linked to you’ll see that he also doesn’t like that one much either and blames the Oxycontin he was on following being struck by a car. So that’s two bad books about evil aliens he wrote under the influence. I’m sensing a trend here. Aside from the drugs though there’s an element of King’s personal outlook that makes him trying to do an alien invasion story problematic. Like a lot of Baby Boomers he has a general distrust of the guvment, and Uncle Stevie’s distaste is so strong that he just can’t imagine them doing the right thing. He also has some anti-tech tendencies and doesn’t think much of science. (The Stand is a prime example of this.) So the aliens are evil, but he also doesn’t think you could trust anyone in authority or with scientific expertise to do anything about them. That’s when King’s anti-establishment nature is at war with his own plot. It's like his alien stories are trying to be both E.T. and The Thing at the same time, and it just doesn't work like that. For example, we get a long conversation when Bobbi (Who is part-Tommyknocker at this point.) is trying to convince Gardner that they can’t call ‘the Dallas police’, and that’s a big point that wins him over because he’s an anti-nuke protestor who doesn’t trust the powers that be with an alien ship. So that means that an alien influenced western writer and a drunken poet who shot his own wife are supposed to be the ones we trust to deal with the discovery of aliens? And yeah, I get that this is a con job to get Gardner to help dig up the ship, but that thread of thinking that the Feds would somehow be even worse than murderous aliens runs through this and Dreamcatcher in defiance of internal plot logic. I mean, do we really believe that some idiot would be so distrustful of government agencies and science as well as have such a strong belief in crazy conspiracy theories that he would shun the system and instead choose to side with a hideous monster in human form who is telling him nothing but lies? Oh….. Never mind. ...more |
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1
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Nov 21, 2016
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Dec 08, 2016
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Sep 22, 2007
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Hardcover
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| 071162005950
| 3.81
| 145,127
| 1989
| 1990
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really liked it
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Stephen King once wrote some books under the pen name Richard Bachman, but the gag was blown by a book store clerk in 1985. In The Dark Half, a writer
Stephen King once wrote some books under the pen name Richard Bachman, but the gag was blown by a book store clerk in 1985. In The Dark Half, a writer using a pen name is exposed and a murderous rampage occurs as a result with numerous victims getting killed in a variety of gruesome ways, including one guy getting beaten to death with his own prosthetic arm. Uh…Mr. King? I can assure you that I have no interest at all in revealing any secret of yours that I may accidently come across someday. I promise. Thad Beaumont is a college professor and writer with a wife and baby twins. Thad writes very serious literature and was a National Book Award nominee for his first novel. Unfortunately, he never really found commercial success and got a fat case of writer’s block along the way. So Thad comes up with the pen name, George Stark, that he uses to write gory crime novels, and those books all become popular best sellers. Part of the Stark mystique is the elaborate history Thad devises for him with George sharing a lot of characteristics with the ruthless killer who is the star of the books. When someone threatens to blow the whistle about who Stark really is, Thad beats them to the punch by going public and declaring that he’s tired of George Stark and will no longer write the crime novels. However, a lot of people connected with ending the Stark name start getting killed. And how can Thad’s fingerprints be all over the crime scenes even though he was hundreds of miles away? Apparently George Stark is a little more real than Thad thought. And he’s very pissed off. If you ever get into discussions about King’s books with his fans, The Dark Half doesn’t get mentioned a lot, and that’s a shame because I think it’s one of his most underrated books. It’s obvious that the idea was inspired by King’s own use of a pen name, and it’s one of the first books that King really started digging into the idea of what it means to write and create something. Those are themes he’d come to explore a lot more in later years, but when Thad asks himself, “Who am I when I write?”, you can feel King pondering that question himself. This feels a little bit different from some other King books because it's a hybrid of crime and horror. As always with King, he starts throwing in more detail than he needs to, and it probably would have been a better book if he trimmed a hundred pages. I still think it’s one of his better efforts and that Stark is one of his scarier villains. I also have a soft spot for this one because it led me to another writer who became one of my favorites. During the story, while Thad is giving an interview about how he came up with George Stark, he mentions being inspired by Donald Westlake using Richard Stark as a pen name for his Parker crime novels. I’d never even heard of Westlake back then in those caveman days before the internet or Amazon, but I thought he sounded interesting so I eventually tracked some of his books down and have been a fan since. Not as good as The Stand or Salem’s Lot or The Dead Zone, but a helluva lot better than Rose Madder or Desperation, this is one that I think should get more attention from King fans. ...more |
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not set
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not set
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Sep 22, 2007
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0451137965
| 9780451137968
| 0451137965
| 3.77
| 214,404
| 1984
| Sep 01, 1985
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liked it
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And I thought the Atkins Diet sounded unhealthy… William Halleck is a successful lawyer living in upper middle class splendor in a Connecticut suburb w And I thought the Atkins Diet sounded unhealthy… William Halleck is a successful lawyer living in upper middle class splendor in a Connecticut suburb with his wife and daughter, and his biggest problem is that he’s overweight. His perfect life is upset when he accidently ran over an old Gypsy woman when he was *ahem* distracted behind the wheel. Since Billy is one of the solid taxpayers who plays golf with all the right people the whole mess is quickly tidied up in court without him getting so much as a ticket. However, another old Gypsy puts a whammy on him and suddenly Billy can’t keep weight on no matter how much he eats. As he becomes a shadow of his former self Billy sets out on a desperate quest to track down the Gypsy and try to convince him to lift the curse of growing thinner. This was the last of the novels Stephen King released under the pen name of Richard Bachman before his cover was blown shortly after its publication. (In fact, he gets cute by having a couple of characters describe the situation as sounding like a King novel.) As with the other Bachman books it seems like Uncle Stevie ran leaner and meaner in this one. He keeps the story focused tightly on its key concept, but he’s also delivering some nice subtext about American culture. We’ve got a nicely ironic curse of a man’s thoughtless greedy consumption being turned back on him as well as exploring the hypocritical way that the decent folk of New England will have their fun with the Gypsies and then run them out of town. One of the strongest points here is in Halleck as a character. Billy seems like a decent guy who genuinely feels guilty about the death he inadvertently caused, and he’s got the brains and courage to face up to the bizarre situation and act to save himself. However, he also went along with sweeping the whole mess under the rug, and he’s willing to turn to a dangerous friend when he’s really in trouble. So there’s a nice mix in him that he’s both somewhat willing to take responsibility even as he trying to wriggle out of the consequences of it. It’s a very solid piece of horror fiction that makes me wish that King would have gotten to do more Bachman books before the secret leaked out. He has published others under the name, but none were ever quite as good as the early ones. ...more |
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Dec 29, 2016
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Jan 07, 2017
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Sep 22, 2007
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 3.97
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liked it
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May 2021
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Apr 22, 2021
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| 4.01
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it was ok
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Jun 11, 2018
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May 24, 2018
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| 3.73
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liked it
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Oct 31, 2017
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Sep 27, 2017
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| 4.11
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liked it
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Jun 19, 2016
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Jun 13, 2016
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| 3.92
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liked it
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Nov 16, 2015
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Oct 29, 2015
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| 4.07
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it was ok
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Jun 06, 2015
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Jun 02, 2015
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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Nov 23, 2014
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Nov 16, 2014
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| 4.02
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it was ok
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Jun 07, 2014
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Jun 03, 2014
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| 4.13
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liked it
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Oct 2013
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Sep 24, 2013
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| 3.93
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liked it
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Jun 10, 2013
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Jun 07, 2013
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| 4.14
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did not like it
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May 10, 2012
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May 01, 2012
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| 4.34
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really liked it
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Dec 02, 2011
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Nov 18, 2011
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Dec 12, 2010
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Nov 01, 2010
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Nov 24, 2009
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Nov 17, 2009
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| 4.08
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really liked it
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Dec 28, 2016
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Jun 09, 2009
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| 3.48
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liked it
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Jan 26, 2017
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Jun 09, 2009
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| 3.98
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liked it
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Oct 25, 2016
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Jul 02, 2008
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| 3.60
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it was ok
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Dec 08, 2016
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Sep 22, 2007
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| 3.81
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really liked it
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not set
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Sep 22, 2007
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| 3.77
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liked it
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Jan 07, 2017
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Sep 22, 2007
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