“Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end. We did fall through, but we helped each other out. We’re still helping each other.”
Welcome to the Supernatural Zone. Not Twilight Zone since Jordan Peele destroyed it with his political agenda. I’ve picked up this book in Audio format thinking it’ll make a great read, much like Elevation did. And it worked in a way and it didn’t work so well in other ways.
This was probably one of the shittiest books I’ve read from Stephen King in all my life. Why? The names sound made-up, the story is lacking in development and is seriously peppered with cultural references which will be obsolete in a decade.
This one was Justin Bieber. Justin’s teeth had been blacked out, and someone had added a Notzi swat-sticker tattoo to one cheek.
This book reminded me of Christine and From a Buick 8 – and both of them were lacking!
“Just thought you might like to know that there’s a little kid playing Freddy Fuckaround at the Mile 81 rest area. You know, where the Burger King used to be?”
A car comes out of nowhere and for some reason decides to stop at a closed road stop at Mile 81. If anyone touches it, they die, horribly.
If you ever wondered whether Stephen King attempted to write another amazing epic since “The Stand” that features a virus outbreak and mass-destruction of human society, “Cell” is the answer.
Except the “Amazing” part. Cell fell short of the epic story involving Captain Trips and resembled more the first season of “The Walking Dead”. I kept on thinking as I was reading this novel – this is soley written with TV in mind. The scene already felt edited, the story already had the aura that you get from watching witty-forced dialogue you see on screen. It wasn’t a massive surprise when I saw that the rights to the movie were picked up and that John Cusack who played in the 1408 adaptation also got a star role in the movie. King stated that because fans didn’t like the ending of the book, he had changed it for the film.. it still sucked.
“God says, “Sure, take away the safety net. And when that’s gone, take away the tight rope too.”
This is one of the many books that Mr. King wrote that got a movie adaptation. A very crappy one indeed. But to be honest, the book wasn’t that good either! You can start throwing your rocks now but this “Desperation” and “Insomnia” were both crappy enough to deserve a sigh and a very slow retreat to the bookshelf in search for something else. It was long. It was repetitive. It was boring.
Plot line can be summarized into “Mad cop keeps travelling family hostage”. That’s it.
“From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.”
This is another one of the dull and long-winded Stephen King books. “Desperation” was like this, “Insomnia” was like this and it has a lot in common with “Christine“. It’s a story about a car in a police unit’s garage. A story how a car that looks like a Buick 8 has been impounded from a petrol station after its owner abandoned it and then strange and spooky things began to happen around it. Like “Christine”.
But this car had no owner that it could be jealous of. This car just kept the air around it cool and occasionally acted like an inter-dimensional gateway to a place where monsters roamed.
And at the end of the book, it briefly attempts to kidnap some policemen and fails. Then it starts to slowly shatter as a door that has been banged too hard shut and the car itself starts to lose its regenerative abilities. The book ends with the possibility of the car failing to be a door anymore and letting the mnsters through.
The narrative style is very similar to “The Wind Through The Keyhole” and “Colorado Kid” where the story is told not by the author but by one of the characters – in this case the town sherriff, Sandy.
He tells the story to the new recruit, the son of a cop who died recently and very much loved by the force he joined.
The book is boring. Perhaps it has something to do with the way the narrative is told- all in flashback; but what we stay with is the initial situation- weird car- and it doesn’t develop into anything like a plot.
“Law enforcement: a case of good men doing bad chores.”
“The town knew about darkness.
It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul”
Vampires are so over-rated or so people think. We’ve had Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Strain, The Summoning, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and True Blood.
They weren’t even close to the amazing Dracula.
But “Salem’s Lot” comes pretty close. I’ve read it in two consecutive nights and by the end of it, I was stealing glances towards my hotel window, I was desperate to go and buy a cross necklace to hang around my throat and I was definitely afraid of vampires. Not the slightly effeminate types that seem to appear nowadays, but of true monsters that lurk in the dark and require blood and lives as subsistence.
The premise of the story is quite simple. One mysterious dead body, a set of newspapermen trying to find clues as to who’s done it and more importantly, how it was done. It’s a tale about mystery and the way to explain it and was adapted into a TV show called “Haven” (which by my humble opinion was a lot better)
A mystery with no resolution plain and simply pisses people off. People want a happy conclustion to a problem–whether it be why 9/11 happened, why oil prices are so high, why a young woman in Wisconsin was murdered, or how a man from Colorado went to work one morning and ended up dead on a little island off the coast of Maine only hours later.
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know, but satisfaction brought him back snap-ass happy.”
“Until we see each other again, keep your head together, read some good books, be useful, be happy.”
Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more serious dramatic bent than the horror fiction for which King is famous. The four novellas are tied together via subtitles that relate to each of the four seasons.
Novels
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (Hope Springs Eternal)
Apt Pupil (Summer of Corruption)
The Body (Fall From Innocence)
The Breathing Method (A Winter’s Tale)
“…he was after all, a novelist…and a novelist was simply a fellow who got paid to tell lies. The bigger the lies, the better the pay.”
This book makes you wonder whether the main character was insane or truly plagued by a writer’s worst nightmare.
King wrote couple of novels under pseudonym Richard Bachman in 70s and 80s. But in 1985, a bookstore clerk figured Bachman is King and wrote an article about it with King’s blessing.
Four years after, in 1989, King wrote The Dark Half: A dark tale where a novelist with pseudonym reveals his secret identity to the public and vows not to write another novel under that particular pen name. But the pen name AKA his Dark Half doesn’t like that…. NOT ONE BIT. So that high toned son of a bitch takes a human form and starts killing everyone who was involved in exposing his identity and more!
“He didn’t know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn’t care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That’s the solution.”
It’s 400 plus pages, but never feels like it and there’s no sense of King straining for effect detectable in other works in this era. The book is a little bit “pulpy” thanks to the whack-a-doodle premise driving its plot, but kudos to King tackling it with unabashed, unapologetic enthusiasm.
Thad Beaumont is a novelist who writes novels in his own name as well as a pseudonym. The works of his Pseudonym, George Stark is grittier, ruthless and more famous, just like the personality of George Stark envisioned by Thad.
As it’s the season to be Merry and gifting – why not go and have a look at another Stephen King book that deals with people WANTING things, NEEDING things, DESIRING things – and a shop that can fulfill every desire, at a price. “Everything is for sale”, “Free trade is what made this country great”, “Selfish people are happy people” and encouraging feelings of “pride of possession” – reinforce the greed, materialism, and self-satisfaction of the 1980s, making the book a possible allegory of the Reagan/Bush administrations.
Everyone loves something for nothing…even if it costs everything.