Tag: stephen king

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book reading reviews

Bad Things – Michael Marshall

Bad Things is the book I alluded to in my review of We Are Here – it’s the book where we first meet the character of John Henderson. So having finished We Are Here and having enjoyed it and that character in particular I thought I’d go straight back and read this. One of the nice things about the way I’m reading at the moment is that I can do this and it’ll not make too much of an impact on other plans because I’m getting through books at a reasonable rate. Also the detours are fun.

Bad Things begins with a very bad thing indeed. John’s infant son, Scott, is out playing by the lake that their home looks out over. He’s on the jetty leading out onto the water when John watches him simply collapse and fall into the lake. When John gets to him the boy is dead, but not from the fall or by drowning, he somehow just died.

It’s four years later and John is now a barman in a restaurant halfway across the country. He’s living alone, his marriage not surviving the trauma of Scott’s loss. However one day he receives an email which just says, “I know what happened.” John is drawn back to Black Ridge, where he once lived, and into a mystery concerning the town itself and what really happened on that jetty.

I enjoyed this book. Not perhaps quite as much We Are Here and that’s possibly because this is darker. It reminded me very much of Stephen King with its isolated semi-rural setting and mysterious dark powers that seem to influence ordinary people’s lives. It’s also possibly because the John Henderson of this story is more troubled, less calm and frankly more of a badass, than the one in the later book. That’s possibly because his son’s death is obviously such a huge part of his experience and it’s through the events of this book that he reaches some sort of peace about it.

The story is quite involved and I had a little difficulty keeping track of all the characters. There was a storyline involving people from the town where he was working at the restaurant, and whilst it connected up with everything else in the end, I could have happily lived without it.

The book has that sense of brooding menace of something nasty lurking in the dark that makes it a compelling, if unsettling read.

7/10 – not one for the squeamish or timid, but definitely a good read.

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book reading reviews

We Are Here – Michael Marshall

I chose this book because well it was just coming out and I thought it would be nice to review something current for a change. Also it appeared to be a stand-alone and not part of a series like the Straw Men trilogy so it wouldn’t matter that I hadn’t read all his back catalog yet. That turned out to be not quite true (see below).

This is a hard book to review because it’d be so easy to spoil it and I don’t want to do that. I also don’t want to hide most of my review behind spoiler tags so…

We Are Here mostly centres around two couples. David and Dawn are a writer and his teacher wife who go into New York for the lunch that seals his first book deal. It’s a big day for them but on the way home David accidentally bumps into someone in the street. Someone who then follows him to the station and asks him to “Remember me”.

The other couple are John and Kristina. A waiter and bar-maid at an Italian restaurant who’ve been together about 6 months and are at the stage where they are about to either get more committed or possibly split up. Kristina’s new friend from her book club has seemingly acquired a stalker and asks John and Kris for help.

Both these stories concern encounters with people who live in a kind of parallel world. They are there in the background of our lives but often go unseen or unnoticed. But something is changing. They are coming out of the shadows…

I could talk more – vaguely and circuitously so as not to spoil – about the plot but I won’t. Let me talk instead about tone and themes. This is a book about regret, about loss of friendship and the way we forget people. It’s also about what it means to really live in a place and be part of someone’s life. In that sense it deals with some universal and weighty themes and does so well I think.

However it’s not a ponderous literary novel. It’s a thriller. It reminded me of Stephen King in places, which is a compliment. I enjoyed several of the characters. The author writes a middle-aged lady with nine cats who lives in a trailer – and he manages to make me really like her 🙂

It’s not perfect. I think it could have been shorter. Particularly in the middle section where dramatic irony is stretched to the breaking point. Also, I was going to complain that there was an un-fired Chekov’s Gun in the form of very significant events from one character’s past which are mentioned more or less in passing but never really dealt with. However it turns out that this character, and these events, are from a previous book. Also they are mentioned because they affect who this person sees and interprets events in this story, so the gun is fired – it just has a quieter bang than you might think.

Anyway it all comes together in the final part of the book and we get a dramatic action-y ending. It left me feeling I’d enjoyed the ride.

8/10 – a thriller with more than a touch of the mysterious about it.

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book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 16: The Shining – Stephen King

So I’ve been a bad boy – in two ways, but I’ll just name the first here – that I read this book 3 weeks ago and haven’t written it up yet. Which is a problem because my memory is terrible and any details I recall have since merged into an overall impression. So I might approach this review slightly differently.

Normally at this point I’d do a little synopsis of the start of the plot so you’d know what kind of story it is and then make my comments on how I enjoyed it (or not). But do I really need to do that?

OK so a writer takes a job as a housekeeper-handyman for an isolated hotel that’s closed for the winter. As he and his family become more cut off by the weather strange things begin to happen.

But you probably knew that because of the film. Even if like me you’ve never really seen the film all the way through it’s one of those things that has so seeped into the culture that you’ll have seen a few clips, or even parodies of famous moments – “Here’s Johnny“? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy“? (neither of those moments are in the book by the way)

The thing is – and I can’t stress this enough – the book is not the film. The film as powerful as it is – and since reading the book I have watched the film from start to finish – is a different story. It has the same elements but the film is really about the descent of a man into a kind of madness, a cabin fever brought on by boredom and isolation in which some spooky things happen but they may just be in his mind. The book is the story of a place, a place where powerful and malevolent forces have infiltrated the fabric of the hotel that’s built there and manifest themselves in increasingly disturbing ways.

I can see why fans of the book might dislike the film.

I wasn’t gripped straight away. It took maybe 50-100 pages. But during the early part of the book I identified – too much for comfort – with the character of Jack Torrance and that kept me interested. Once we get to the hotel, the tension ratchets up increasingly as the chapters go by and by the end it’s a really suspenseful page-turning thrill of a ride.

Funny anecdote – whilst I was still about halfway through for a little light relief I decided to break from reading and watch that episode of Friends where Joey’s reading the Shining and has to put it in the freezer. Of course what I’d forgotten about that episode, kinda the point of that strand of it, is that Joey spoils the book for Rachel. So even though I knew I knew the ending of the film, I also knew that the ending of the book was slightly different and didn’t know exactly what it was – until I spoilt myself by watching Friends.

Except not really. One way I can tell this is really a great book is that even though I knew a lot of the bare bones of the story (from the film) including the ending (from Friends) I still enjoyed this read.

8/10 – A master story-teller on his game.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, 11.22.63 – Stephen King (pages 7637 – 8489)

After I read Under the Dome earlier in the year I said to myself that I probably wouldn’t read another Stephen King novel. However I heard about this on Newsnight Review and was seduced by the concept and by the generally favourable comments on the writing. Also buoyed by my latest burst of enthusiasm for reading I didn’t feel intimidated by the length so I thought why not?

11.22.63 is a novel that centres around the assassination of John F. Kennedy on that date. However it’s a work of fiction and science fiction at that. A man who owns a diner in 2011 discovers in his store-room a kind of portal, what he calls a ‘rabbit-hole’ referring to Alice in Wonderland, that you can step through and be back in 1958. He convinces a friend of his, a school-teacher to go through the rabbit-hole, live in the past and then attempt to prevent the shooting of JFK.

I said that this was a science fiction book but as with Under the Dome King has a story he wants to tell and a way of setting it up which he cursorily describes – the time-travel is largely the later. It’s noteworthy that he chose not a time machine which could be targeted at a particular time but a naturally occurring (though presumably rare) phenomenon which a fixed exit point in time – September 9th 1958. This is worth pointing out because King makes it impossible for his hero to do anything other than spend 5 years in the past in order to achieve his goal. So really there are a few things this book could be/is about:

  • time-travel and its consequences, inherent paradoxes etc
  • what everyday life was like in late ’50s/early ’60s America
  • the events leading up to the assassination, and in particular the movements of one Lee Harvey Oswald
  • an alternate history story of what the world would have been like if the assassination attempt had failed.

And 11.22.63 covers all of these to a greater or lesser extent. However I think it’s fair to say if you’re more interested in the time-travel specifics or the alternate history than say Oswald and the 60s then you may not enjoy this book.

As it was I enjoyed it more than Under the Dome but still felt it was a little long. The book is split into sections and in the first there is a fair bit about the rabbit-hole, how it works and whether it’s possible to change the past at all (it is but “the past is obdurate” we discover). Then there’s the central section which involves the main trip back to 1958 and the following 5 years. This itself is split between a story of our protagonist actually living in the past – where he lives, the job he does, friends he makes, the woman he loves – and his attempts to track Oswald and gather the information he needs to stop him. The former I enjoyed, the later was over-developed in my opinion. I realise King has done lots of research and read lots of books but I really don’t need most of that information.

Of course these two stories inevitably come together and climax at the date in question.

I feel like there’s a really good 500-page novel in here. I’d cut a lot of the Oswald background details. I’d also trim down the story of how they prove that the past is changeable – which is almost a novel in itself. At 853 pages it tested my patience but I still came out enjoying it overall.

A couple of stray points. It’s noteworthy that whilst the hero is 35 in 2011 a sense of nostalgia pervades some of the descriptions of the past (like how wonderful the root beer tastes) and I think that’s because King was 11 in 1958. Also there are some references to other King novels – this is something he does apparently, I remember M. telling me that there are references in Under the Dome to characters in The Stand. Here the descriptions of the town of Derry, as if the place itself had some sort of supernatural malevolence, confused me slightly. Apparently if I’d read other works by King I’d’ve got the reference.

Finally worth pointing out, because it’s easy to forget and I did, that although there’s not much violence in the book when it does appear it’s pretty graphic. I was reading it wondering if it was strictly necessary then remembered I was reading an author best known for horror fiction.

Anyway – long book, long review, time to stop.

7/10 – a bit of a slog but worth it.

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6000 pages reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Under the Dome – Stephen King (pages 1-881)

Yay so I finished my first book of 6000 pages 2011. It’s almost April and only one book? Well fortunately it was a long one. A very long one.

This is actually the first Stephen King book I’ve ever read. I may have dipped into Salem’s Lot after it was on TV as a teenager but I’ve never read a full novel. Mostly that was because I didn’t really respond to horror as a genre. Well this isn’t horror (well… but we’ll get to that) and I’d read the blurb and it sounded interesting. Plus M. had read it.

Under the Dome is about a small New England town that wakes up one morning to find that an invisible barrier has been placed all around it. The story then revolves around the efforts of the people in the town to cope with effects of being cut off from the rest of the world. They have to survive with whatever resources – including people – that they have. The book has a lot of different characters but follows about half a dozen closely. Ultimately the question becomes whether they can discover what the Dome is and whether they can get rid of it.

No wait. That’s not ultimately what the book is about. It’s the question we finally get to at the end of it, but the book is really about what happens to these people when they’re forced to survive on their own. And it ain’t pretty. It becomes a sort of Lord of the Flies for adults.

All of which I found quite interesting and fun – for the first 400 pages or so – but in the back of my mind I wanted to know more about the Dome. I decided it was one of three broad possibilities based on what genre this book was part of –

  • the ‘thriller’ answer – the Dome is put there by some shadowy government agency, or foreign power. The reason why here particularly will perhaps be connected to one of the characters’ pasts.
  • the SciFi answer – aliens put it there and by the end of the book we’ll meet them.
  • the Supernatural answer – it’s some ghost or human with spooky powers doing it.

The trouble is that that isn’t what King was interested in telling me about. The Dome is just a macguffin to set up the trapped situation. So whilst he does finally explain where the Dome came from and why, 95% of the novel is not about that at all. Perhaps it’s a tiny  bit of a spoiler to say that but if I’d known that I may not have read the book. (Although it does occur to me now that the fact the book’s called ‘Under the Dome‘ and not ‘The Dome‘ is a clue.)

I also felt that whilst the story of how they folks cope was interesting – it went on too long. An example from early on in the book is the various incidents as people discover the Dome. Mostly these are accidents as people hit the invisible barrier, whether in their cars or on foot. There a wide variety of these recounted in detail. After about 5 or 6 I had gotten the idea – it was a barrier, it caused accidents, it affected a lot of folks in the town – but King describes probably 2 or 3 times that many incidents. It’s like if you were making a movie and in it there’s a scene where a crowd turns nasty. You’d hire a lot of extras sure, and you’d film a few close ups of individuals shouting and baying for our hero’s blood (say) – but once you’d shown a few of these shots cut with wide shots of the crowd you’d have created the necessary impression. No need to labour the point.

King is very good at creating tension in the plot, so you do sort of want to know what happens next. It’s just that a lot of that was about detail and you could sort of see where it was all going.

Without being spoilery there were things about the ending that I didn’t like. It’s like at a certain point he feels he’s done what he set out to do and then thinks “how can I wrap this up quickly?” Well the way he chose was effective, even spectacular, certainly a climax for the novel, but for me personally, a little unsatisfying.

6/10 – there’s a lot of ‘under’ before you get to the ‘dome.