Creeping in Castle Rock

Is Gwendy's Button Box the first Castle Rock story in the Kingiverse that's co-written? I'm not sure and at the moment I don't want to google it, but the novella is a creepy little tale by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar that I both enjoyed and was horrified by, which is the best that can be expected when you're dealing with King.

The story is uncomfortable in that it makes you feel the weight of responsibility put on our titular Gwendy, and as she grows familiar with the eponymous button box so do we - it's an object of obsession and control and we become nervous about its use and fate.

The book is short, which places it in a good position relative to some of the other Castle Rock stories. I think the novella format is perfectly suited to our jaunts to the creepy little town. The Body and Sundog are stronger works than Cujo, certainly.

It may well be that Castle Rock is such a known quantity (though not monstrous like Derry) that we don't need to get to know the setting - all you have to understand is that the story takes place in the sleepy little village and you already know the history of misery behind the place.

Bad things have happened here but it is not a bad place.

Anyway Gwendy herself is fantastic and I'm always happily horrifed when we get a visit from the dark man. I never know what Flagg is up to but I can rest assured that nothing good is going to come of it.

Which is exactly what happened here and why I'd recommend picking up the book to see what's going on for yourself.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Scary stuff

If there's ever a new Stephen King short story collection for sale at the airport, you should buy it. It'll be a great read on an airplane and it'll keep you awake long enough to adjust to local time.

I love Stephen King's short fiction. He seems to be fairly self-critical when it comes to the form (at least that's what I gathered from the introductions to the stories in this collection) and more at home in terrifyingly long novels, but I think his shorts may actually be my favorite variety of his writing.

The Bazaar of Bad Dreams is full of works of various lengths, including a couple of poems. There are at least three stories in it ("Blockade Billy", "Morality", and "Under the Weather") that appear in different collections or and that weren't new to me, and that was a bit of a bummer because Blockade Billy and Morality are *long* and that meant I didn't get quite as much new material as the page-count suggested, but it was nice all the same to see the stories re-contextualized by their inclusion in a wider body of work.

I can't think of a single story in the collection that I didn't like (though I was pretty ambivalent about the poems) but I'll tell you that "Batman and Robin have an Altercation," "Ur," and "Drunken Fireworks" are three completely fucking brilliant stories in three totally different genres that you should check out right now if you have the ability to do so.

This isn't King's best short collection (That's either Four Past Midnight or Everything's Eventual, depending on whether you prefer horror or creeping horror) but it was a delight to read and I found myself enjoying almost every page.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Find the book here! I read the large print edition because I'm a prematurely old lady.

Follow the fish

Stephen King is 68, which I know isn't old old but goddamnit he's starting to write things like an old man and it worries me. I'm part of a generation that has never NOT had a new Stephen King on the racks once every year or so (and, let's be honest, it's more like once every seven months or so). I've grown up reading King, I've gone from panicked, wide-eyed, under-the-covers-to-keep-the-monsters-out-reading at thirteen to rushed, wide-eyed, I-can-squeeze-in-another-five-minutes-on-my-lunch-break-reading at twenty-nine. Every new King novel is intoxicating for me, I want to rush through it and rip the story into little bites that I can shove in my mouth as fast as I see them and I know someday that will no longer be a joy I can have and it worries me, and makes me sad, and King seems to be writing like he knows that. Like he and Bowie got together and talked about how they'd troll their fans.

End of Watch is like that. I raced through it, I adored it, and it scared me badly in a way that goes well beyond the spine-tingling creeps in the story. I mean, fuck, even the title's a bit grim and on-the-nose, isn't it?

This is a brand new book so I don't really feel comfortable saying anything about it out of fear of sharing spoilers. I'll just say that I really think it delivered in terms of the series, and that the writing in it seemed stronger than Finders Keepers and the story was a satisfying conclusion to the groundwork laid out in Mr. Mercedes. Actually this may be the best King novel in terms of pace, craft, and plot that I've read in years. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but perfect is the enemy of good and End of Watch really is a very good book. And it's a very good Stephen King book specifically - it includes many elements that have been absent in King's more realistic fiction but combines those old standards with the exploded-mystery-novel feel that's been present through the whole of the Bill Hodges trilogy.

And now that the trilogy is done I feel totally comfortable recommending it. It's all worthwhile to read and I may make time to read through the whole thing in the next couple of months so I can review it as a whole without worrying about spoiling it within a month of publication. There ARE things I have issues with in all three books (primarily the stereotypically racist diction that one character repeatedly falls into - and having all of the characters in the story realize the diction is a part of a racist stereotype doesn't excuse it). The good far outweighs the bad, overall, but I don't want to give the impression of perfection.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. End of Watch. Scribner. New York: New York. 2016.

Just a taste

I'm always perplexed when I discover a Stephen King book that I've not yet read. When I was in high school I pretty much caught up on everything he'd written from Carrie to Cell so I feel like I've read everything but I keep forgetting that the man is a bloody machine and will just keep pumping out two books a year with occasional additional collections of shorts or novellas.

He's also had a habit in the last ten years or so of releasing off-genre pulp novels and shorts through an imprint that seems never to make it to the endcaps in bookstores, so I never end up finding these until they pop up as recommendations on Amazon. Goodreads helps - they have their nice little monthly flier about new works by authors you've read in the past - so hopefully I'll be able to keep up more in the future.

Anyway, Blockade Billy is a tiny little book made up of two non-horror novellas. The titular short is abut a ballplayer with a shocking secret. "Morality" is a short that covers the well-covered question of whether accepting money for doing something awful will turn you into an awful person.

"Blockade Billy" is interesting - it's a bit spooky and feels like a King story in the atmosphere and character development even if it isn't really a horror story. The characters are fun to get to know, the narrative is nicely constructed, and overall it's a good way to sit down and spend an hour disappearing into some fiction.

"Morality" is regrettably cliche - it's basically a rebranding of The Box mixed in with Indecent Proposal and watches the dissolution of a marriage over a husband and wife team committing a crime that is bad but not heinous for a $200K paycheck and not being able to cope with the guilt. It feels somewhat lazy and is incredibly predictable - I don't regret reading it, really, but there's no reason for me to ever read it again.

I do sort of wish this had been a larger collection though; I feel like with another couple of stories Blockade Billy easily could have fit in with Everything's Eventual or Different Seasons as a solid collection of shorts. And I like short collections because they're a good way to introduce new readers to an author or to participate in that author's worldview without having to dive headfirst into a novel. As it stands this double feature isn't quite enough to sink into. I enjoyed it but it was over much too fast.

King, Stephen. Blockade Billy. Scribner. New York: New York. 2010.

Stories to tell

The mistake I made in preparing to write this blog was clicking on the Wikipeda page that tracks all of the connections to The Dark Tower series in the Kingiverse. That ate up a couple of good hours and all just so that I could tell you that there was an eight year gap in the publication of The Dark Tower and The Wind through the Keyhole. Which is, incidentally, a delightful book.

When I was a kid my dad used to read "The Pension Grillparzer" to my sister and I. It's a short story in the middle of The World According to Garp and was my first introduction to John Irving. As I've grown up and moved through life and giant piles of books I've mentally created a category of Grillparzers - stories within stories that might work as bedtime stories to introduce my potential children to authors I like. I love this sort of thing. Everyone knows about the play within a play from Hamlet but no one seems to talk enough about the self-contained worlds you can discover in other books. Neil Gaiman seems to be particularly good at this (in addition to hiding stories in his introductions and end notes), within-a-storytelling is very present in Lord of the Rings, you'll find lots of within-a-storytelling in any universe that needs to have a background mythology set up fairly quickly so you see a fair amount of it in SciFi. There are sections of The Wind through the Keyhole that are going to be read to my children at some point in the future. And  they won't even be traumatized by the Stephen Kingishness of the story because this isn't a horror story, it's a fairy tale.

The structure of the book is a bit clunky, which I guess is probably clear from the paragraph above. There's a frame story, a main narrative, and then the story within a story that's really more of a standalone novella. The frame story is really only there to remind you of the world we're watching from in case anybody forgot what was going in the eight year break from Mid World; the main narrative is an action story with monsters and gunslingers who are still young enough to not anticipate big mistakes; the story within a story is really the meat of the thing, though. It tells a story of magic and dragons and nuclear mutants and terrifying storms that all pale in comparison to the sheer stupid horror of human pettiness. It's a wonderful little moralistic story that is spooky and sad and about how absolutely much it sucks to grow up and lose the magic in the world.

I've written enough about King that everyone reading should know I'm a huge nerdy fan but this is one of those nice reminders. King's books are all over the map - he's written a western/magical epic, a story about a dog with rabies, alien horror stories, werewolf stories, vampire stories, a terrifying story about rats in a cellar, a novella about a man wrongly imprisoned, a novella about a decapitated corpse performing Lamaze breathing, at least four post-apocalyptic thrillers, and one very good book about a good but stupid king who once killed a dragon. Now there's another story that's essentially unlike any of the others but fits into the King canon brilliantly. It's excellently done and I'm very happy to have read it.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. The Wind through the Keyhole. Scribner. New York: New York. 2012.

You're my obsession

I really didn't expect there to be a sequel to Mr. Mercedes. I know there was a zinger at the end but it didn't percolate as anything other than a frustrating tease for me until I saw the cover of Finders Keepers and realized that Bill Hodges was getting a sequel. And then I found out that it's a fucking TRILOGY and I can't even tell you how excited I am about that.

I was very iffy about Mr. Mercedes but the problems that I saw with it weren't present in Finders Keepers - we don't spend as much time with Bill, Jerome, and Holly as we did in the first novel but that doesn't change the delightful depth with which this mystery is approached.

So we all know that King was an addict right? He's been in recovery for a long time but the man understands addiction and therefore he understands obsession and it's that understanding that is turning the Hodges Trilogy into something that I'm squealing over. My favorite King stories are the ones that delve into various flavors of suffering - the frustration of Rage, the sorrow and loss of Lisey's Story, and the mingled hope and horror of The Stand speak to me in a very intense way, and Hodges and Co are doing the same thing with obsession.

Actually, it's not so much Hodges as the people he keeps running into. The antagonist in Mr. Mercedes and both the pro- and antagonists in Finders Keepers have powerful, life-ruining obsessions, and boy do I ever get that. Bill's starting to get into the game too - he's beginning to lose himself in the pursuit of an answer to a question he probably shouldn't be asking.

But he'd hardly be a good private eye if he could keep himself from asking questions, now, would he? That's another thing that I like about these books - I get really frustrated with your traditional whodunnit mystery novels because they're usually either too predictable or they leave out vital information that makes for an unsatisfying ending - Hodges stories are not, thus far, traditional mysteries. They're mystery novels exploded and turned inside out; the reader has everything figured out long before anyone else but that doesn't matter because the tension and suspense are maintained by excellent characters instead of by the need to constantly solve puzzles and problems. You can enjoy the solution to the problem while the dramatic irony keeps you in agony for the characters that are so easy to care for and fuss over.

I made a mistake when I bought this book. I went to the store and grabbed it at around 10:00 pm, I started reading it at around 10:30 pm and couldn't make myself stop until I ran out of pages at around 4:30 the next morning, approximately 5 hours before I had to be at work. I have a bad habit of doing that with King novels, and by now I should probably just know to not start them until the weekend, but I can't help it. I'm a little obsessed.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Finders Keepers. Scribner. New York: New York. 2015.

Stand on principles

My terrible habit of stealing books (from hotel libraries where they're covered in dust, from coffee shops where they're languishing unread in favor of a copy of Candyland missing half the pieces, from well-intentioned friends who lent me a book that I forgot about and then rediscovered as one of my favorite books) may be an outgrowth of my much better habit of accidentally giving books away. I lend books out to friends and then either forget completely that I used to own the book or just don't want to pressure someone into returning something they may not have read yet. That's how I lost the first three books of The Baroque Cycle - I let a friend borrow them and couldn't bring myself to ask for them back.

A similar thing happened to my copy of the complete/uncut copy of The Stand - I bought it to read on my honeymoon, finished it, lent it to the friend whose house I was staying at, and have never had the heart to ask for it back. I got married in 2011 so I figured I had to let it go and buy a new copy - no great loss, that two people who like the book get to read it more frequently.

I first read a tattered copy of The Stand that my high school library eventually threw out, allowing me to rescue it from the recycling bin. It was a really early paperback, maybe '81 or '82 so it was the shortened version. I reread it probably ten times before I realized there was an even longer version available. The uncut edition is WONDERFUL and I actually have trouble imagining reading the edited version again because I don't think I'd enjoy it so much without the wealth of details that washed in with the republication.

Let's get this out of the way: a lot of people hate this book. Most of the people who seem to detest it either can't get around the changes from the '79 edition OR they would have hated either version for being too long and tedious or too "preachy". Spoilers out there for those who dropped they book because it was preachy - you're idiots. Any universe that King writes is not one that is home to a just and loving god. Good and evil is NEVER black and white in a King story. For the people who couldn't hang with the length or the number of characters or whatever, go back and try again. Please. Parts of the story can get a little slow, sure, but a book isn't a shot of cheap tequila; it's more like a glass of wine - savor it, even if it doesn't taste great at first, to see what it's made of.

So anyway, a lot of people don't like this book but I do. I like the depths to which the characters are examined and the depravity that examination yields; I like that I like the bad guys more than I like the good guys - the bad guys are, with a few exceptions, better written and more interesting. This is one of those things that I'm talking about when I say good and evil isn't black and white in King's universe: he's the one who wrote these horrible people to be more accessible, more fun to read, and more sympathetic and human than the characters on the "right" side of the conflict. I like that even the characters who are "good" aren't all always good - sending Tom as a spy is enough to prove that they're more self-interested than saintly.

I'm also one of those fans who switched - I can't read the older version anymore, the complete and uncut edition of The Stand has too much going for it that I adore. Greater depth to the characters is fantastic and all, but I think my favorite part of the new edition is The Kid. He's dark and gross and hilarious, don't tell me, I'll tell you. The best part of either edition is, of course, Kojack. It's hard not to like a dog in any sort of context, but it's impossible not to love a dog who's another plague survivor trying to bring back a world where he feels safe.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. The Stand: Complete and Uncut Edition. Random House. New York: New York.
     1990. (1979).

Wistful winter

 
Blaze is a Richard Bachman trunk novel - an oddity. Stephen King retired Bachman decades ago so the decision to publish an old Bachman book in a new century seems strange, but it's nice to flesh out the body of work.

Everyone who reads this blog (hi Dad!) knows that I'm a little crazy for King - what a lot of people don't know is that I may actually like Bachman more than King, at least when it comes to the ratio of books by that author that I've gotten completely completely obsessed with. Rage, The Long Walk, and Running Man are totally amazing stories written in a way that is endlessly fascinating and exciting. Roadwork is similarly engaging but a bit too depressing for me to totally dig my teeth into. Thinner is a Stephen King book published by Bachman, and it's a good King novel but it's not a Bachman Book. I know that's a little confusing, but the King readers out there get me.

Blaze clearly belongs to Bachman, dead lo these many years of Cancer of the Pseudonym, Stephen King's more hardboiled half. The story has the same sort of depraved futility of Running Man and Roadwork with the horrifying and misplaced innocence of Rage and The Long Walk. The elements are all there. Blaze is clearly a Bachman book. But, even though I adore Bachman, I can see why this remained a trunk novel for so long.

In the introduction to the novel King admits its faults - and there are many, and they are large - which helps. Knowing that this is a book that languished in a box and was written by a pen-name that died thirty years ago and wasn't revisited because it was remembered as bad gives some perspective on the story. It's not great, but at least you go in knowing that it's not great so it doesn't sting so much.

But there is one aspect of the book that is wonderful. Blaze is a good character: you want him to win, you understand why he can't, and watching him make mistakes that he can't help but pulling for him along the way is painful and sad and BURNS, and that is fantastic.

King-as-Bachman makes you pull for this sad, stupid, small-time crook while still seeing the inevitability of his failure and being helpless to help him.

And that's what's great. Everyone who CAN read this book is more capable than its main character and that means that all of us behind the pages will WANT to help him, want to make his broken life better, and so King-as-Bachman manages to brilliantly reduce his readers to the same incapable state as Blaze.

Well damn done, especially for an imaginary dead man's trunk novel.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Blaze. Simon & Schuster. New York: New York. 2007.

I hope you're well, Mr. King

I'm pretty sure that Stephen King has written at least two characters who were novelists with the idea to store up novels like nuts for winter, writing two a year but keeping one back to publish during spells of writers block. I mention this because for the last two years King has had a summer and a fall novel release whereas for the better part of the 2000s he's published maybe one novel a year. I do know that he was publishing as Richard Bachman for a while so he could put out multiple novels each year. But now he's publishing under his own name and this makes me a bit wary.

Here are the possible reasons that I'm able to come up with:
1 - Stephen King is even more terrifyingly productive than the reading public has been giving him credit for and is going through a good spell, publishing whatever he writes.
2 - He's rotating through his trunk novels and updating them before technology changes enough to leave his plots in the dust.
3 - He has taken a look at his pile of nuts and realized that it'll outlast any dry spells he could reasonably anticipate and has decided to go for broke and publish them while he's still around to do the publicity tours.

Stephen King is not an old man, and the sudden glut of publications makes me worry a little because I feel like he's either sitting on a massive pile of unpublished novels or he's worried that he's going to die soon. So, Mr. King, I really hope that you're well and just way more prolific than any of us have given you credit for. Please be well.

Because you're writing kick-ass books and I'd love to see them keep coming.

Revival is another novel that I happened to surprise myself with. I was scanning titles on Amazon, saw a King book I hadn't read, and said "dammit, I hope I'm not too late!" I feel left out if I miss a publication by more than a month or two, so I was pleased to see that it was only a week after the release date. I drove out to the bookstore, grabbed a copy, got an awful cold, and found that I had time to sit down and read.

It's a damn good story. Really good.

The plot follows the patchy life of a guitarist turned drug addict turned producer as he meet up with an electricity-obsessed preacher. Both characters are interesting and have their various ups and downs as you follow them through five decades of their separate but occasionally convergent lives.

One of the things that I missed so much in Mr. Mercedes was the deep character development that's so typical of King's writing, and I certainly didn't miss that in Revival. It's not a very full world that these characters inhabit, because it's mostly our world and doesn't need that much filling-in, but their lives are intricate and lovely and unlovely.

The book opens with King thanking his teachers, notably HP Lovecraft and Mary Shelley, and there's a strong influence from the great horror-writers of yesteryear that can be palpably felt throughout the novel. It's clear that those spooky old books are gone from the charts but not from our hearts as King channels the writers who influenced him and gives modern readers a shocking story about veils that should not be peeked beyond.

Cheers,
     - Alli

Dome for the holidays

I don't really know why I haven't read Under the Dome since it first came out, but here we are. I'm kind of an idiot for skipping it all these years, though. Under the Dome is a pretty fucking good Stephen King novel.

I do feel like I need to add that qualifier, that it's a Stephen King novel, because I'm not sure this is a book that fits neatly into any genres. There's suspension, science fiction, horror, humor, and bedroom drama but all tied together and just a bit downstate from Derry so I guess the only place it really feels at home is in the literary universe of King.

I don't really like adding those kinds of qualifiers, but I'm not sure that anyone whose first experience with King was Under the Dome would feel like they got it. I think they'd kind of sit up and go "what the hell just happened" because there's a fair amount that happens that I'm not sure other authors could get away with: hell, I'm not all that sure that King gets away with it.

At one point in the book King references the journalist's basic "W"s - the who, what, when, where, why, and how that a local (or regional, national, and global, really) newspaper reporter should turn to before all else. I think that, when King was writing this novel, he could have safely abandoned the last two questions of his fictional journalist. Why and How cause problems in Under the Dome. Why and How aren't things that the audience really needs answers to and I think the answers that King gives are the only problematic part of the story.

I'm trying to dance around giving bits of the book away, here, and there's a good reason for that: I'm not worried about spoilers, I'm worried that the why and how of Under the Dome will be enough of a turnoff for some readers that they won't even bother with the book. Why and How feel like a cop out, like the easy answer, and like the things that define UtD as a Stephen King novel instead of a political apocalyptic horror story.

This book is over 1000 pages. It's a great book for 985 of those pages but there are just a couple thousand words that feel really problematic to me. The rest is AWESOME so I don't have that much of a problem ignoring the flaws, but I'm also a fangirl and I don't know that new readers or people who are critical of King will be as happy to overlook the frustrating answers to Why and How.

But they should. The characters in this book are stunningly crafted and the unearthly universe King plops into the middle of central Maine is fascinating. The plot is perky and keeps you going through a few draggy spots. There are plenty of people to love and hate and be incredibly frustrated by as you move through the pages, so if you have a day or two to kill Under the Dome is a good way to take care of that time.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Under the Dome. Scribner. New York: New York. 2009.

Keys to the Kingdom

Like Lisey's Story, Duma Key is a tale of losing something precious and finding something horrible. It's also an excursion into stunning visions of beauty.

People like to talk about the way King builds characters and settings an awful lot, and it's true - most of King's characters, even his most minor characters, are typically round and dynamic; the towns that King builds are eerily present as you read his novels. But none of that really stands up to the way he gives you his eyes.

Duma Key has a great story and lots of interesting people and takes place on a spooky Key off the coast of Florida, but most of all the novel paints pictures for you. There's very little in it that you'd be fuzzy on if you were pressed to draw it - everything from the Bride of the Godfather's shoes to a chain of rainbow-colored frogs to anger-management dolls is described in vivid and disturbing detail, raising the highlights and shadows to the brilliant contrast of a sunset over the water.

The novel as a whole is pretty damned solid - not as firm and frightening as The Stand or The Shining, perhaps - but the real triumph of the story is in the seeing. Duma Key makes its gifts and its nightmares clear to the reader and you're trapped within its feral beauty for better or for worse.

Largely it's for better. I don't think Duma Key is anyone's favorite King work, but it's well worth reading if only because it will drive you to create. Art is a gift, and the gift is hungry - this is what King passes on, more than anything else, with Duma Key.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Duma Key. Scribner. New York: New York. 2008.

Aching

It's only on this most recent reading of Lisey's Story that I'm beginning to realize how much of Stephen King's post-2000 fiction is more about loss than it is about horror or darkness.

Don't get me wrong, the darkness loves him and he still dances well with it, but we're not really seeing darker halves or werewolves or vampires in King stories nowadays - we're seeing people nearly destroyed by the loss of a loved one, or a timeframe, or a job, or a limb and trying to struggle back to the light and dragging us with them.

This feeling kept booming through me when I was reading 11/22/63 - Jake's loss of Sadie is very thoroughly expressed and totally heartrending - but it really rolled to the forefront of my mind while following Little Lisey through the pages as she loses one person after another and suffers and suffers and suffers for it.

I'm not the sanest booby in the hatch and I'm well aware that I have dependency issues so maybe I shouldn't read books like this, but it's not going to stop me. Lisey's Story makes magic out of mourning: it breathes in the sweet small jokes and touches that fill up a good relationship and exhales them as poison when the sun goes down.

In the afterword King reminds his readers that he's a writer of fiction and not to think that Lisey is supposed to be an analogue of Tabitha King, and I don't believe she is. But I do believe that King loves his wife, maybe a little harder than is healthy, and revels in that love. Only someone deeply in love can fear loss and communicate that jagged, mourning word "alone" as well as King does in Lisey's Story.

So kiss your baby ... babyluv and try not to dance too much in the darkness.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Lisey's Story. Scribner. New York: New York. 2006.

The past harmonizes

I don't know much about Kennedy. I suppose that makes baby boomers feel about as distant from me as I feel from the kids born after 2001 - there's a gulf between the people who lived through major events and those who just heard the story later. For the people who lived it, it isn't just a story. It's your life.

That made reading 11/22/63 an interesting experience: King does a great job of helping you to live in those places that you haven't been. He colors the buildings and flavors the food and drowns you in a fog of foreign smoke until you start to accept the way that the characters are thinking and acting as something less alien than it was before you open the book.

I guess it's probably different, like everything is, when you've lived through it. But the Kennedy assassination brought forth a wealth of literature and national introspection, while academics are still saying that American literature hasn't recovered from 9/11. I don't know if I agree with that or not, but I suspect it may be at least partially true. We can write about old wounds, but we don't know how to write about pain we still feel. Not as a nation anyway. This is something that King alludes to in his afterword - he initially tried to write this book in the seventies but the wound was still to raw.

When I first read 11/22/63 I stayed up all night reading it (in spite of having to go to work the next day), something that I hadn't done in a long time. This time I didn't quite stay up all night (I think it's my third reading) but I stayed up late and let it eat up my spare hours for a couple of days.

King's 1958 is intoxicating and grotesque. He props up the mythical structure of the time, the nifty fifties that so many people seem to think they'd want to live in, and rips it down with the realities of the time - the racism, the misogyny, the resignation to living under an atomic shadow. It's a place you'd want to visit, not one where anybody sane would want to live.

11/22/63 is also the novel that houses one of my favorite King characters, Sadie Dunhill, who is wonderful and strong and scared all at the same time. Sadie is well worth reading, as is Jake/George, and really, King's 1958 shouldn't be missed.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. 11/22/63. Scribner. New York: New York. 2011.

A book with a split personality

I first read It on October 27th, 2000 - I had checked it out of my high school library the Friday before Halloween thinking that I'd have a good creepy story to read before trick-or-treating. Things didn't exactly work out the way that I'd planned because I got the book home from school at about 3pm and proceeded to read in a sweaty panic until 10 the next morning. My book didn't last me quite 'till Halloween but it did give me the scare that I was looking for.

I've read the book a few times now - my first copy got destroyed in a flood, which is a little creepy considering the content of the book - and I usually like it. Sometimes It pisses me off but usually I feel pretty good about the story and the characters and the pacing.

This time I was a little confused by the construction. Since I've read the book eight or ten times, and since it's got a non-chronological structure I knew which bits of the story were coming but I couldn't quite tell when and so I ended up spending at least the first six hundred pages waiting for the book to get started and the last four hundred pages not really being ready for it to end.

Most of the story takes place in 1958 with only little bits happening in 1985 but both times are a detriment to each other (or felt like it on this read-through). The 1958 story is pure and bright and sweet and horrifying and it gets muddied by the more realistic monsters of suicide and abusive husbands who haunt the characters in their middle age. Each character has a story that I'd be interested in reading on its own and so sometimes it's a bit frustrating to have to ignore that character for two hundred pages while you're paying attention to someone else.

It was written during King's Drugs and Alcohol period and the book reflects, in some ways, the mind of its author. It's a little jumbled at times, really messy occasionally, frequently unspeakably dark, but puts on a good face for people stopping by to visit. It's only the people who have dug too deep that really seem to see the problems.

Maybe King isn't the kind of author you're supposed to read and re-read and re-re-read time and again but I can't help it. I don't dig through theses stories looking for mistakes (though sometimes they're there) - I read through these stories because I love them and I want to live them again and shiver in the dark with all of my friends.

I didn't have a great read-through of It this time, I felt like these people who worked so hard got shafted in the end. But next time I read It I'll probably feel different - I'll probably think that forgetting is a gift and memory is suicide and every hero is happiest if he doesn't have to focus on his heroism.

But I do know there will be a next time. There always is. Because I'm one of those, the ones who obsess and dig and always scamper back to the light showing the pretty things they found in the dark. So thank you, Stephen King,
     - A Constant Reader

King, Stephen. It. Signet. New York: New York. 1980.

The shadows inside of us

"1922"
This is a story about a man being eaten by monsters of his own making. It's viscous, angry, and creepy. There are layers of insanity here that are driven by greed, jealousy, and mutual misery. It's a singularly unpleasant little tale, but one worth reading because of its examination of the fact that evil is a sickness that spreads and infects everyone it touches.

"Big Driver"
If ever there was a story that should start with "trigger warning" this is it. An author goes to a presentation and is violently raped and left for dead before she can make it back home. She discovers the identity of her rapist and plots her revenge. It's an ugly story about an ugly act but what it really has going for it is the rage and shame and helplessness that the victim feels in the aftermath of her rape. If you want a good look at rape culture take a hard look at the echo chamber in this character's head - the fear that her rape will be discovered, that she will be blamed for it, that it will hurt her career, that it will follow her everywhere she goes all the time for the rest of her life. King really seems to be making an excellent point here - the way we as a culture punish rape victims for being raped makes it feel like violence is a better option than prosecution.

"Fair Extension"
Thinner is a novel that Stephen King wrote as Richard Bachman; at the end of the novel a man tries to end his curse by passing it on to his wife but instead passes it to his daughter and decides to take up the curse himself rather than let his daughter suffer alone. This novella examines what might have happened if the curse had been properly passed to the object of his hatred. A nice, normal bank manager with a run of bad luck asks for an extension that comes at the expense of his best friend since grammar school and gets it. There's something delightfully poisonous about how few qualms he has destroying another person's life.

"A Good Marriage"
What would happen if you found out you had been married to a serial killer for three decades? Would you "suffer"? Probably. King tackles that question with aplomb and tries to take a realistic look at what might happen to someone who had been happily married to a monster until that monster's mask fell off.

"Under the Weather"
 This icky little story is full of humor and madness and follows the afterword of the collection. It's not, like the novels in the collection, packed with evil people committing evil deeds - it's just the story of someone very sad trying to figure out whether life is worth living when you've lost something important. "Under the Weather" is touching and nauseating in equal measure.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Full Dark, No Stars. Simon & Schuster. New York: New York. 2011. (2010)

Sequels don't have to suck

I was left a little cold by reading Mr. Mercedes a couple of times last week so I decided to read another recent King book. A lot of people seem to think that King has "lost it" and writes out of habit or because he likes the money this late in his career. To those people I say "BULLSHIT."

Not every novel can be a hit and with the amount that King produces it's not surprising that his work isn't uniformly brilliant - sometimes you swing and miss. But I've really enjoyed most of the novels that King has published in the last ten years; it just so happens that Mr. Mercedes wasn't a home run - and I don't even think it was a miss, but maybe a foul or something instead (I don't really understand baseball).

Doctor Sleep is the novel that King published last year; it's a follow up to The Shining and it's amazing. I made the same face a lot of people make when they hear about a sequel to something as "important" as The Shining but I was incredibly pleasantly surprised with the novel.

The story follows Danny Torrence into adulthood and examines the problems that he has as a result of the terrible winter spent in the Overlook Hotel but also those problems that are simply the result of who and what he is.

In several of his novels King plays with the idea that some children carry magic inside of them, and it's fascinating to see that idea exploded onto adults with all of their vices and evils, and that is the world as King lays it out in Doctor Sleep, one with magic that saves lives and grows love, and with hate and avarice that want to steal that magic.

The book is creepy but not scary and touching but not sappy. In all aspects of the novel there is a wonderful sense of balance which, to me, proves that King is still writing because he likes it and cares for the craft - not because he just can't get out of the habit.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Dr. Sleep. Scribner. New York: New York. 2013.

Second glance, second chance

I wasn't totally sure how I felt about Mr. Mercedes after I read it last week so I read it again.

On a second read-through I still see a lot of the same problems that I noticed the first time around - a lack of characterization, some profound misunderstandings about how computers work, and so on.

Something else became more obvious to me, though, and made me realize why the book didn't resonate with me the way that King's novels usually do: there was no magic.

I mean this in both a literal and figurative sense - literally, there were no ghosts or demons or specters or any of the other otherworldly things that so frequently pop up in King's writing and I actually really missed that. I'm not big on reading mystery or crime novels and that's all that Mr. Mercedes is - a crime drama. Figuratively there was an authorial spark missing; something was off somewhere and the book was lacking in pathos - it spent a lot of time discussing tragedy without ever feeling tragic after the first chapter, which was the only part of the book that I really strongly connected with.

It still isn't a bad book, by any means, and it certainly isn't a dull book either. It's just not what I was looking for when I went looking for it and that's probably my own fault for typecasting King than it is King's fault for skipping some of his standard practices.

Cheers,
    - Alli

King, Stephen. Mr. Mercedes. Scribner. New York: New York. 2014.

German engineering

 
Stephen King keeps doing this thing where he writes really awesome books and then I read them and then I'm done reading them and I'm sad. Not because the books he writes are sad (though sometimes they are) but because I'm all out of new book to read. Whenever a new Gaiman or Gibson or Stephenson or King book comes out I'm incredibly giddy right up until I realize that it's all gone and I have to wait for the author to write some more.

I suppose this is a problem that many avid readers have.

When I first found Mr. Mercedes I nearly bought it on the spot while trying to kick myself for not knowing that King had a new book out. I resisted the temptation for both the purchase and the kicking and waited until my mom gave me a Barnes & Nobel coupon which I then combined with a member discount and a gift card. I may really love reading but I'm also really cheap.

But anyway, the book.

The story is fun, and pretty fast-paced. Mercedes is somewhat shorter than many King novels, coming in at just over four hundred pages, and the story isn't any more expansive than it ever has to be so it's surprisingly trim.

Some of the King trademarks seem to be missing; the characters aren't as aggressively developed as King characters often are and I think that takes away a bit from the novel. There's also something a little bit strange going on with diction with one character in particular that is potentially offensive, though I think it may just seem offensive because the character isn't as deeply developed as secondary characters usually are in King's hands.

It's also pretty clear that the main character's confusion about computers is shared by the author. Crumbs in the keyboard won't cause a screen to freeze and I don't have any idea how you'd get peanut butter in a CPU (most people who are technically incompetent enough to smear peanut butter on computer components are too technically incompetent to get access to the part of the box that has important components in it). That lack of knowledge is troubling because there are at least a few characters who are supposed to be good with computers. King admits in the acknowledgements that this is his fault and his fault alone but it is still distracting.

Other than those minor problems the novel is, by and large, very good. There's a lot of control, chaos, darkness, and madness explored here. The contest of wills between a retired cop and a supposedly retired mass murderer is fraught with suspense and, I will admit, nearly kept me home from work so that I could read it in one sitting.

Well worth picking up if you're a fan of King, and by far a better book than some of his recent efforts.

Also, look at how awesome that cover is!

Cheers, 
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Mr. Mercedes. Scribner. New York: New York. 2014.

Not horror but just right

It really bugs me that Stephen King gets pigeon-holed as a horror author as frequently as he does - he does so much more than that and it's almost always wonderful.

That being said, there is a strong element of the supernatural in his  Hard Case Crimes story, Joyland, that is perhaps more common to the horror genre than to the pulp mystery traditions.

The novel is a delight. It's easy to sink into, the characters are round and whole and interesting, the setting is whimsical and sad and spooky all at once. It does, however, suffer from the same problem that all mysteries do; now that I know whodunnit I'm not going to get as much out of rereading the story.

That is, of course, not going to stop me from rereading it. Joyland is full of, no surprise, joy. There's a whole world of carney lingo, sick kids, southern beaches, and broken hearts in its pages and I want to go back. I feel like a kid after the calliope music has stopped asking "can I go again?" and I'm pretty sure that's exactly how you're supposed to feel after reading a kickass book.

There is one scene in the story that stands out to me over the rest of the story as the moment that will call me back to this book again and again. It's not a scary moment or a horrifying moment or a moment with a hard-case detective chasing down a lead - it's a moment that involves the hokey pokey and a confused, sweaty college kid making the world magical for a few minutes.

It's things like that, little tidbits of sparkling humanity, that make me really appreciate King and get pissy when people deride him as "just another horror writer" - King isn't a scarejock, he's a fucking magician and his magic is that he can make you feel nervous for a kid in his first day on a new job just as well as he can make the hair stand up on your neck when a cat crawls out of a creepy boneyard.

Augh, it's just amazing. Long live the King.

Cheers,
     - Alli
(And I want to give a shoutout to my cousin, Tara, here - if you, like her, like novels about amusement parks this is a must-read.)

King, Stephen. Joyland. Hard Case Crime. London. 2013.

Season's Greetings

"There's a guy like me in every state and federal prison in America, I guess - I'm the guy who can get it for you."

The Shawshank Redemption is a startlingly good film to have originated in the mind of Stephen King, an author whose works have been turned into such absurd constructions as Maximum Overdrive and Cat's Eye. So many people think of King as nothing more than a banal horror writer, and sneer when his work comes up in conversation. What is even more startling is that a writer as good as Stephen King has long been thought of as a producer of popular trash and nothing else.

I'm torn as to whether King does his best work in his insanely long novels or in his short stories, but what I do know is that he shines in his novellas. Different Seasons is a collection with four wildly different novellas between its covers. "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" is the first of these four, bright and hopeful and bursting with quiet joy. The story is told by Red, a long-timer in a drab prison telling the story of an innocent inmate, and is a wonder of cadence and rhythm. The brilliance of the story is in its narration - Red is a flawed man, a bad man in some ways, and a deeply fractured man, but you come to love him and his quiet, unassuming voice as it ushers you through the pages of his story. You can really hear him as you read; King never breaks in to do his King thing, he just lets Red take his pen over for a while and tell you about a man he once knew.

The plot of the novella is perhaps a bit trite, the characters include some standard prison-story staples, but none of that matters because King has set you up with a hearth and home to hear a story - his casual, sad, scared narrator puts a comforting hand on your shoulder and ushers you through each sentence with charming familiarity. Your sunshine is his sunshine, and you can still feel it on your face with every rereading, no matter how well you know the story.

"He looked like the total all-American kid as he pedaled his twenty-six-inch Schwinn with the apehanger handlebars up the residential suburban street, and that's just what he was; Todd Bowden, thirteen years old, five-feet-eight and a healthy one hundred and forty pounds, hair the color of ripe corn, blue eyes, white even teeth, lightly tanned skin marred by not even the first shadow of adolescent acne."

"Apt Pupil" is in the "Summer of Corruption" season of Different Seasons (Red tells his story from behind the title"Hope Springs Eternal"). The narration is firmly back in Stephen King's hands, with his side-shifting parentheticals making a few appearances as characters crack and criss-cross moral and personal boundaries. It is one of my favorite kinds of Stephen King stories - a supremely creepy story with nothing supernatural. In fact, it reads a lot like one of the Bachman Books - thrillers penned by King under the pseudonym Richard Bachman from 1977 to 1982, nearly all of which completely eschew the supernatural - and is all the more creepy because it seems like something that could really happen. It is the story of a young monster and an old monster meeting up in suburbia, each poisoning the other quietly under the noses of unsuspecting spectators.

There are two passing and incredibly minor references in the story to Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (actually the same reference made twice). It is my suspicion that "Apt Pupil" grew, as many books do, organically out of another story; that one day Stephen King found himself thinking about the old man of Hemingway's, wondering how he came to be quiet and alone in a cafe late at night, what he went home to, what his history was, where his friends were. Because it was King writing the story we are presented with a long, chilling examination of depravity and the ability that depravity has to take root in anyone - the thought that not all men are mad but what men are mad are infectious.

"The most important things are the hardest things to say."

"The Body" ("Fall From Innocence" chapter of Different Seasons) is a profoundly sad story about boys becoming men. It is haunted by an aching nostalgia and humming with the muted joy of memory as it follows four boys on the path to find a body in the last days of summer.

Nobody writes about 20th century boyhood as well as Stephen King does, and if not for Twain I'd say that nobody has ever written as well about boyhood in any century. The effortless way he gets the sun to shine in your memory, the dust to blow through the streets of your mind, and the heat to shimmer over invisible pavement while you feel a Coke in your hand and hear Roy Orbison on a nonexistent jukebox is just a little scary. Every time King writes about kids I feel like I'm wearing old jeans and new Keds, holding 50 cents in my pocket and standing on top of the world.

This is another novella with a strong narrative voice, but one where King shines through his speaker. Gordie Lachance has a lot in common with King, primarily that he is a writer, and offered up a nice opportunity for a couple stories-within-a-story, one of which was probably written as a throwaway for the novella ("Chico"), while the other ("The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan") may have been a fantastic opportunity for King to publish a short, hilarious story that otherwise might not have seen the light of day.

Reading "The Body," you're just another kid walking along the railroad tracks, slapping skin, being afraid of the dark and of the wide world you're just starting to understand is out past the horizon. You feel the timelessness of childhood wrapped up in the weight of mortality.

"I dressed a bit more speedily than normal on that snowy, windy, bitter night - I admit."

The problem with frame stories is that you never know which story is the real one. I've read "The Breathing Method" (Season - "A Winter's Tale") at least four times before this and only now am I realizing exactly how creepy the club that frames the story is.

"The Breathing Method" is probably the weakest novella in the collection (it is also the shortest by far). It is more truly a horror story than any of the other stories, and has more supernatural weirdness rubbed up on it than the others do. The construction of the framing club and its strange environs are much more compelling than the admittedly spooky subject matter at the heart of the story.

It stands out from the other novellas, not quite making sense as it rubs shoulders with them. The only thing it has in common with the other seasons is the thing that all of the seasons have in common - a ripe thread of nostalgia binding them together as tightly as the glue in my paperback copy is holding the pages together. The nostalgia in the final novella has thinner lips and sharper teeth than the warm memory of "The Body" or the thin hope of "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" or even the drunken recall felt throughout "Apt Pupil, but it is there nonetheless. No matter what may be said of the stories in this collection, they do all have some wistfulness and whimsy; they all shine a light through the dust of mental attics and seem to say "I remember when..."

King talks to his readers. It's a well-known trait of his, sometimes popping up in the actual text of his novels, most frequently observed in fore- and afterwords addressed to his Constant Reader. King has quite a lot to say to about Different Seasons, his first collection of novellas (though not the last, as time would tell), explaining how he shopped the idea to his publisher, when the stories were written, how he felt about being typecast, but more than that he had this to say: "I've  been in love with each of these stories, too, and part of me always will be in love with them, I guess. I hope that you liked them, Reader; that they did for you what any good story should do - make you forget the real stuff weighing on your mind for a little while and take you away to a place you've never been. It's the most amiable sort of magic I know" (Afterword, 506). If there is a better reason for reading or writing a story, I've never heard it. Maybe that's why King has become such a staggeringly successful author; he know what it is to want to disappear.

Cheers,
     - Alli

King, Stephen. Different Seasons. Signet. New York: New York. 1983. (Originally published 1982.)