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 siA 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
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 wI’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
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 aThis 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
I received an advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Elvis and horror go together like a peanut butter-n-banana sandwich. Which is to say thatI received an advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.
Elvis and horror go together like a peanut butter-n-banana sandwich. Which is to say that it catches your attention, but it might not be something you’d want to make a regular part of your diet.
This is a prequel story to Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-Tep in which we learned that the rumors about Elvis faking his death were true, and that he was living out his final days in a shitty nursing home where he gets into a scrap with a mummy. Here we’ve got The King and one his minions, a bodyguard/hanger-on named Johnny Smack, who secretly fight evil supernatural beings under the command of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The Colonel pulls Elvis away from his Las Vegas shows to go on a mission to New Orleans where interdimensional vampires have been turning people into living basketballs while draining away their essence. Several other monster fighters are brought in to help vanquish them, and they all soon fight themselves in a terrifying fight for their lives.
It’s a real mixed bag here with Lansdale doing some genuinely creepy horror of a kind I haven’t read from him in a while, and the idea that Elvis led this double life as a fighter against the evil is kinda enjoyable. My favorite part involved Elvis and his crew trying to hold off the bad guys by going Alamo in a house protected by magic and a horny ghost, and there’s another good bit that involves taking a pink Cadillac into another dimension which is wonky fun. However, a lot of time is spent trying to explain how the guy who became a fat jump-suited pill-addicted joke about this time was actually a tormented bad ass. If you’re going to do a book like this then I get that Lansdale has to pump Elvis up into more than a handsome guy with a great voice and sex appeal who eventually became a victim of his own success into something more substantial, but it just didn’t work for me.
I also really liked both the original story and movie adaptation of Bubba Ho-Tep which played more into the idea of a ‘realistic’ older and faded Elvis who doesn’t know anything about monsters looking back at his life with regret and making one last stand to reclaim some of his old glory and dignity. This undercuts that idea with the revised history although Lansdale makes a mighty attempt of stitching it together into a retconned timeline.
This also has one of my pet peeves of an author putting a bunch of similar looking names together with Elvis’ team consisting of Johnny, John Henry, Jack, and Jenny so apparently this book was sponsored by the letter ‘J’. It’s extra aggravating when you’re reading a poorly formatted advanced e-version that has turned much of the text into word salad and makes it even more confusing.
As a Lansdale fan who got it for free I enjoyed it well enough, but it looks like this is going to be originally released as another one of his collector’s edition hardback, and the current price on Amazon is $40 for 200 pages. That’s way too much money both the quantity and quality of story you’d get for the price....more
I received a free copy of this book for review from the author.
Can you imagine waking up on an island with a bunch of good-for-nothing junkies who almI received a free copy of this book for review from the author.
Can you imagine waking up on an island with a bunch of good-for-nothing junkies who almost immediately start going into withdrawal and puking all over the place? And your only way out is by swimming through waters infested with hungry sharks?
Still, it sounds more appealing than being on a season of Survivor.
So these smack-hounds wake up on a beach in the Florida Keys with no idea how they got there. There’s a small amount of food and water left there with a note that they can get more by swimming to the next island, and the bigger prize is a whole bunch of heroin if they can make it through the sharks. Will they try to swim for it or not?
Uh, I did mention that they are junkies and there’s heroin on that next island, right?
There are some stories idea that just sound so amazingly outrageous that you immediately want to check them out. Sharks vs. Junkies is one of those. Messum walks a fine line here of setting up an idea that could have been a movie on SyFy channel, adding enough depth of character and tragedy so that it doesn’t seem like a total cartoon, and then still delivering enough scenes of sharks devouring junkies that it satisfies the itch you got when you heard the idea. (You sick bastards!)
I’m not sure if this could have been sustained in a longer novel, but at 288 pages it hits the sweet spot of being tight enough to work without feeling rushed. Intercutting flashbacks of each character gives us a snapshot of their lives as addicts, and Messum makes them sympathetic by highlighting wasted potential but he doesn’t glamorize or excuse them.
I was a little less sold on the parts that shift to the men behind the whole Turn-Junkies-Into-Fish-Food scheme. There’s decent motivation provided, but I think the book may have worked a tad better if we knew nothing about them or why they were doing it until the very end where the final chapter provided an excellent opportunity for a bit of exposition to explain motives. Keeping them more mysterious might have tightened up the book even further and added more tension.
Still, it’s an intriguing and well written story that delivers on the concept it’s selling. It also reinforced my belief that nothing good happens in the ocean.
Finally, I owe J. Kent Messum some thanks. He had approached me about reviewing his newer book, and I turned him down because I’m just a dick like that. Then Dan told me about this book with sharks chewing on heroin addicts, and I’m only human so I wanted in on that action. I didn’t realize that this was by a writer I’d previously refused to review, but once we got that got sorted JKM was very gracious and cool enough to send me this along with his new one Husk which I’ll read and review soon. ...more
This is yet another story that confirms my firm belief that nothing good ever happens on a boat. The movies and TV alone provide an endless list of reThis is yet another story that confirms my firm belief that nothing good ever happens on a boat. The movies and TV alone provide an endless list of real and fictional disasters like Jaws, The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic, A Perfect Storm, All Is Lost, Dead Calm, Captain Phillips, that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the gang buys a boat and Dennis makes a chilling explanation of the ‘implications’ when sailing with a lady, that other episode of Sunny when the gang goes on a cruise and everything goes horribly wrong.... Damn. I didn’t realize Sunny had two episodes about boats…Maybe three if you count the time that Frank hijacks the tourist boat to get to the movies…
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Boats. You can keep ‘em.
But some people actually are foolish enough to leave land. Like Kelly and Dean, a couple who have spent a year going around the world on their sailboat Freefall in an effort to save their marriage. Their relationship is on the mend as they’re cruising near Antarctica when they hear a frantic radio call from someone in trouble, and the signal is quickly jammed. They try to find the source of the transmission but have no luck. As they head to South America the radar tells them that a ship is following them, and it’s getting closer.
I’ve become a big fan of Jonathan Moore lately thanks to the excellent trilogy he wrote in which each book had its own particular style. The Poison Artist was moody psychological suspense, The Dark Room had a whodunit mystery vibe, and The Night Market was a near-future sci-fi conspiracy thriller. In the tight 200 pages of Close Reach Moore shows that he can do yet another genre that is equal parts survival-at-sea and horror.
It’s a terrifying story that works in large part due to the detail work Moore put in to make even a landlubber like me understand how the boat functions and what being on your own in a remote part of the ocean is really like. The tension ramps up to nail biting levels as Kelly and Dean try to fight their way through an on-coming storm while the mysterious boat gains on them.
I don’t want to spoil the twists and turns of the story, but suffice it say that when the confrontation comes a whole ugly level of hell is unleashed. Fair warning that this is a dark and brutal story that has blunt and graphic descriptions of all kinds of harm that people can inflict on one another. It made me wince and squirm at several points, but Moore’s skill and pacing keep it from sinking down to the level of torture porn.
The frank nature of the violence isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you’re up for it then you’ll get a fantastically gruesome tale that’ll make you practically taste the salt of the cold ocean spraying across your face....more
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 sIf 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
It’s a good thing I don’t like fish because I damn sure wouldn’t be eating any for a good long while after reading this.
The survivors of the first twoIt’s a good thing I don’t like fish because I damn sure wouldn’t be eating any for a good long while after reading this.
The survivors of the first two books have been stuck in the remains of the drive-in which was transported to a weird jungle where hungry dinosaurs roam. The people are living like savages in the remains of the cars and things are bad enough that eating a baby is frowned on as a minor social faux paux like burping at the dinner table. But hey, the movies are still somehow still showing at night so at least they’ve got entertainment!
Some of the folks decide to head out in an old school bus they’ve modified, and their journey leads them out on a vast sea where eventually they get swallowed by a giant catfish. That’s when things really get weird.
I didn’t like this third book in the Joe R. Lansdale’s Drive-In saga nearly as much as the others. The first book was grounded in it’s average Texas location at the start and that carried over at least a little into the second book. Here, things start out at crazy town banana pants and escalate from there. Plus, when the characters have already gone through so much it gets harder to make things worse although Lansdale gives it a mighty try by reducing them to rag clad starving wretches who have to deal with things like how best to poop out a school bus window.
Things just got a little too strange, filthy, gross, and overall bat shit (Or fish shit in this case.) crazy for my taste. This was headed for a 2 star ranking, but I did kind find some of the crazy imagery and ideas at the end interesting, and there’s still some quality Lansdale style dialogue that can be both sad, funny, and disgusting all at the same time so that bumped it up to 3....more
You gotta admire Joe Lansdale’s gumption. If you write one short crazy-ass horror novel about an entire Texas drive-in filled with people being trappeYou gotta admire Joe Lansdale’s gumption. If you write one short crazy-ass horror novel about an entire Texas drive-in filled with people being trapped in the limbo of an endless night that devolves into a frenzy of violence and cannibalism that pales in comparison to the horrors unleashed in it by the supernatural Popcorn King, then most writers might put their pencils down and not try to follow it up. So how do you top that madness? Easy. Add in some dinosaurs!
Three survivors of the first story leave the ruins of the drive-in only to find that the highway now leads through a prehistoric wilderness complete with the occasional T. Rex sighting. After some traveling and recuperating they eventually run across a woman named Grace who also lived through the terror of the never ending movie marathon but met something even worse afterwards in the guise of a deranged guy whose head has been turned into a television and calls himself Popalong Cassiday.*
* It'd been a long while since I read this, and I'd completely forgotten about Popalong Cassiday. Now I'm wondering if Brian K. Vaughan might have drawn inspiration from this for his robots with televisions for heads in Saga.
Grace is determined to return to the drive-in and stop him, and the guys agree because one of them has the hots for her and real friends don’t let a buddy go alone to confront a psychopathic guy with a TV for a head while trapped in an episode of Land of the Lost. I’m pretty sure that’s in the Guy Code somewhere, or if it’s not, it should be. Anyhow, hilarity ensues.
Like the first Drive-In this bizarre set-up sounds like it might be something meant to be comedy-horror, and there are some good laughs since Lansdale can create dialogue and descriptions to make the most awful of people, events, and circumstances funny. However, despite the goofy premises both books have a seriously dark streak of nihilism and misanthropy. The ending is a bit anti-climatic by design with Lansdale deliberately trying to stand a lot of the tropes of TV and movies on their heads. There’s a real anger and ugliness lurking just below the surface of these books, and that makes them interesting.
However, I liked this one slightly less than the first one because there the story begins with the normality of a bunch of people going to the movies and then descends into chaos. Here, the story starts off as crazy town banana pants, and then tries to take that up a notch. Once you’ve shown that people are shit who will cheerfully shed the thin veneer of civilization in the midst of a bizarro meat grinder then it’s really hard to make that any worse although Lansdale gives it a mighty effort.
It’s still a short and disturbing horror novel that will make you laugh at inappropriate times, and I’m curious to get to the third book to see how it gets wrapped up....more
With a new Hap & Leonard book out and the TV series based on their adventures coming soon it seems like Lansdale Fever is sweeping Goodreads these dayWith a new Hap & Leonard book out and the TV series based on their adventures coming soon it seems like Lansdale Fever is sweeping Goodreads these days. I blame Dan for infecting me with this particular strain of the virus.
I’d read the first two parts of The Drive-In saga way back in the ‘90s when I first discovered the Champion Mojo Storyteller, but I’d forgotten most of the story and never even gotten around to checking out the third installment. Then Dan spread his contagion all over the place, and I found myself rediscovering the gruesomeness of the Popcorn King all over again. Thanks a lot, Dan!
During the late ‘80s in Texas four young men head out to the local drive-in where they plan to spend the night watching a horror movie marathon. In the middle of their films a comet with a smile roars by, and the entire drive-in is suddenly surrounded by an inky darkness that dissolves anyone who tries to leave. With no other options the trapped patrons watch the movies over and over in an endless night as the food starts to run out. That’s when things get even weirder and more horrible.
This is a very short book, and that’s a good thing because I don’t think spinning the concept out much longer than 150 pages would actually work. (Although I’m sure Stephen King would have taken a 700 or 800 page swing at it if he would have thought of this idea first.) What really sells it is that Lansdale quickly provides the details that ground things in reality among the most mundane circumstances of people going to the movies before unleashing the batshit craziness. Then he uses the most terrible of creatures, human beings, to set the stage for the real horror show which becomes a gory supernatural B-movie spectacle.
Lansdale mainly uses two characters to represent different points of view. Our narrator Jack holds the desperately hopeful belief that there is some inherent goodness and meaning in humanity’s existence, but the counterpoint is his buddy Bob who operates under the basic assumptions that people are just bastard covered bastards with bastard filling and that believing in anything other than yourself is a waste of time. This is pretty much the same dynamic that defines the soft-hearted Hap and the pragmatic Leonard so you can almost see Jack and Bob as an early trial run at those two characters.
The part that really got to me this time was that period before things really go sideways when everyone is just stuck watching the movies over and over again while living off concession stand hotdogs and popcorn. While drive-ins were pretty much dead in my area by the time I was a teenager I’ve attended some movie marathons, and I think Lansdale really nailed that weird dreamy limbo state that sets in if you spend hour after hour staring at a screen in a theater as you shove popcorn or candy into your mouth.
Like most things Lansdale it’s got some funny stuff mixed in with some sharp edges that unsuspecting readers might cut themselves on. Overall, it’s weird and gory in ways that are different than most horror stories you’d read, but it’s also got an ugliness to it that definitely cuts into the fun factor you might expect from something this bizarre. ...more
It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marksWell, that was a spoonful of nonsense.
It had a promising start with the outbreak of a disease known as Dragonscale which first manifests as dark marks on the skin. Getting a free tribal tattoo might not sound that bad, but the real problem is that eventually infected people burst into flames and burn to death. The damage caused by walking blowtorches and the fear of being infected have society teetering on the brink of collapse.
Harper is a young nurse who discovers that she has contracted Dragonscale and she’s pregnant. If that isn’t bad enough her jerk-face husband Jakob goes coocoo for Coco-Puffs and thinks they should just kill themselves. During a desperate moment Harper finds help in the form of a mysterious guy dressed as a fireman who leads her to a hidden community of infected people who have found a way to survive the disease. Unfortunately, discord within that group proves as dangerous as the vigilante Cremation Squads that have started murdering the infected.
It’s a strong premise, but unfortunately there’s a number of factors that drag it down. First and foremost is that it’s way too long. Hill can’t seem to commit to one main story, and he keeps adding on to it like a late-night TV commercial promising, “But that’s not all!” This causes a lot of drift with a long swath of the book not even touching on what’s going on in the outside world and forgetting what should be major characters for long periods of time. It’s also like one of those action movies that never seems to know when to end that goes on 20 minutes past the point where it should have wrapped things up.
I also wasn’t a fan of Harper, and since this whole story is built on the idea of a plucky heroine trying to survive a civilization ending plague then I needed to have at least have some respect for her. Unfortunately, she comes across as twit who never seems to wise up until something terrible happens. Which it does. Repeatedly. I lost count of the number of times where she is shocked by the bad intentions of someone and says things like, “You can’t!” It’s the apocalype, lady. They can, and they will. Her infatuation with Mary Poppins, and Hill’s constant use of it and its songs are also way overdone.
In fact, there’s just too much goddamn music in this book overall with constant quoting of lyrics and talking about various musicians. It's a crutch Hill leans on far too often. Plus, it’s all Jurassic Rock with a smattering of ‘80s pop in there with even an old VJ from MTV having a role to play. It’s 2016, Joe Hill. I don’t need your main character, who is supposedly in her early twenties, lecturing me on what the preference for the Rolling Stones or the Beatles says about a person.
Another piece that flies off this jalopy of a book once it gets up to speed is the nature of the disease itself. There’s a lot of effort spent to convince us that there is a rational scientific reason that people would turn into Zippos, and I can suspend disbelief enough to go with that concept. But when more and more is added to the point where we’re into ideas like people being able to generate and control fire without their clothes burning and even more weirdness then you don’t need Neal deGrasse Tyson to call bullshit on it. Just as he couldn’t seem to commit to one story or another Hill can’t seem to decide if he wanted a more grounded concept with some science behind it or if he wanted to jump full-on into the supernatural pool.
Hill also opted to run home to Daddy in this because the entire book is absolutely rotten with Easter eggs of Stephen King’s work. A few references can be fun, but when Hill essentially ‘borrows’ a character from The Stand including a cute little name trick to underline it then it’s crossed the line. (Harold Cross? For a character who is essentially Harold Lauder? That's weak.*) After a while it started to seem desperate, as if Hill knew things weren’t going well and hoped he might use fan familiarity of his father's books to invoke some of his magic. Hill also seems to have inherited his father’s trait of having a bunch of characters claim that they’re are critically short of time only to have them waste most of it with idle chit-chat and banter that is supposed to be funny and make you like the characters. It’s not, and it doesn’t.
So at this point Hill is 2 for 4 with me, and after this I’m going to need a really good reason to pick up his next one.
* And I didn't think about this until I read Edward Lorn's review where he pointed out that there's also a deaf character named Nick. Come on, Joe Hill. You're better than that....more
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 iHey, 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
Either I’m a lot dumber than I thought, or this book isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. Or maybe both. Ambiguity! It’s a bitch.
Scott McGrath used to Either I’m a lot dumber than I thought, or this book isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. Or maybe both. Ambiguity! It’s a bitch.
Scott McGrath used to be a hotshot investigative journalist until he started looking into mysterious and reclusive film director Stanilas Cordova who has been holed up in his remote estate making underground masterpieces of suspense that seem to ruin the lives of almost everyone involved with them. (Think M. Night Shyamalan before we all realized that he actually sucks.)
McGrath trashed his career by making accusations against Cordova based on a single source he didn’t verify. When Cordova’s talented daughter Ashley commits suicide by leaping down an elevator shaft in an abandoned building McGrath decides that he can vindicate himself by looking into her death as a way into once again digging into Cordova’s life. Circumstances force McGrath into a reluctant partnership with a shady young man with a personal connection to Ashley and a young actress wannabe who met the doomed woman shortly before she died.
That’s when things start getting weird. Is Cordova a brilliant but eccentric filmmaker, or is he an evil puppet master willing and capable of destroying people’s lives via unknown forces? Was Ashley just a confused young woman who met an untimely end, or was she stalked by supernatural evil brought about somehow by her father? McGrath’s investigation dumps him into a maze that leaves him questioning reality itself.
As a kid growing up in the ‘70s there were some horror movies that took on an almost legendary quality back in those pre-Internet days. You’d hear adults talking about something called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and someone with wide eyes would confidently assert in a whisper that it was based on a true story. Or some kid at school would tell you that that his brother had told him that the devil was actually in The Exorcist. There’s a story in my family about how my aunt was so terrified after seeing The Shining that she demanded that my uncle take her to another movie immediately afterwards because she was positive that she wouldn’t be able to sleep for days if she didn’t do something to try and get it out of her head that very second.
That’s the power that horror movies used to have, and I think a lot of that has been lost in these days of DVD directors' commentaries and IMDB trivia pages. What I liked a lot about Night Film is that it seemed to recapture some of that old spirit. One of the creepiest aspects was that idea that a movie can be dangerous because some filmmakers are so deranged and/or tapped into something strange that could literally cause psychological damage to a viewer. Cordova as this mysterious figure whose films inspire underground viewings and a cult following was suitably spooky and unsettling. There’s an underlying theme of hidden worlds that can be accessed or expressed via film that I would have liked more of.
I think where I ran into problems personally is that the book tries to have it both ways. It’s functioning on some levels as a pretty standard thriller, and if you judge it like that, I found things like the characters actions and plot machinations kind of cliched. However, if you look at it as more of a David Lynch kind of experience, something where the normal rules get checked at the door, then it feels more ambitious and even a little dangerous.
Yet, it doesn’t seem to want to just dive in and go bananas either. It was almost like the grounding of the story dug in a little too much and started to feel like an anchor that really didn’t let the weird aspects hit their fullest potential. It’s hard to explain without writing an entire essay about the plot. I can sum it up by saying that while I know the story is about the ambiguity of walking through the shadows, I think it either needed to turn the lights completely on or off at some point. Which isn’t entirely fair because it’s obvious that the author was trying to walk that line and does it pretty well, but for me I would have liked a bit more commitment one way or another.
One other note about the multimedia aspects. The book has a lot of graphics in the form of pictures, news stories, and web pages, and I downloaded the app that lets you scan some of these that provides bonus content like audio recordings or a diary of a character. That was generally well done as a way to provide some extra atmosphere without being too much of a distraction. I wouldn’t want it in every book, but for a story like this it was a gimmick that worked well without being overused....more
Even in a fictional book in which he’s supposed to be the hero Richard Nixon can't help but be an asshole.
The concept here is that when Nixon was an uEven in a fictional book in which he’s supposed to be the hero Richard Nixon can't help but be an asshole.
The concept here is that when Nixon was an underhanded congressman trying to prove that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy he inadvertently stumbled across a hidden occult world of Lovecratfian style horrors. This discovery and his ambition paves the way for him to become a reluctant KGB spy which in turn helps him become vice-president. He then learns that President Eisenhower has control of vast magical powers that he is using as part of a secret supernatural front of the Cold War as the Soviets try to harness these horrors to gain strategic advantages for themselves. As he moves through Eisenhower's administration to his own presidency Nixon becomes a pivotal figure in this underground war.
This book surprised me because I was thinking that it would be done in a tongue-in-cheek way that played off the idea of Richard Nixon being a hero after all, but in fact it’s the exact opposite. The portrayal of him here is still that of an insecure and bitter guy who seemed to lack the charisma and charm of a used car salesmen, but whose relentless drive and willingness to fight dirty enabled him to rise to power. This is more of a character study that just puts a supernatural coat of paint on the man rather than try to shine him up into something he wasn’t.
That’s an interesting way to go, to use this kind of a book to not tell us that what we knew about Nixon wasn’t wrong, it’s just that we didn’t know all of the story. Grossman is a good writer who actually manages to generate sympathy for Tricky Dick as he acknowledges his faults in his first person narration.
But that leaves me not sure what exactly the point of all this was. The idea that all these weird occult happenings have links embedded in the foundation of American government was interesting, and it seems like there was the potential for a good story there. However, we see this through Nixon’s eyes, and he doesn’t really know the full scope of what’s going on until late in the game. Since this is an outsider trying to look in telling us the story it seems like we’re only getting a glimpse of a secret history although some of the historical incidents have an interesting twist on them like the moon landing. It also feels like we don’t know the rules here because none of it is explained in detail as to what’s possible, and most of the book is spent with a confused Nixon trying to figure out what’s happening and never getting a great handle on it.
Essentially it just feels like the whole book was done to give us a supernatural excuse for the reasons behind Watergate. That might have made for an interesting short story, but by writing Nixon as Nixon with a few more secrets and not giving us a deep dive into the occult side of stuff, the book ends up feeling generally unsatisfying....more
(I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
Most of us like to act like our jobs are hell. But what if your j(I received a free advanced copy of this from NetGalley in exchange for this review.)
Most of us like to act like our jobs are hell. But what if your job actually was in Hell? Then bitching about the broken microwave in the break room would seem kind of silly.
Hell may no longer go in for casting sinners into burning lakes of fire, but it’s still all about the eternal torment. Now human souls are fished out of the sea of Limbo and crammed into human meat suits and live a grubby existence where they are abused by the demons who treat them like second class citizens. The lucky ones may have some kind of factory or farm job where they get to toil all day and live in crowded shabby rooms with few comforts. Unlucky ones get jobs like being sex toys for the demons, and they have a very short shelf life.
And just because you’re dead and in Hell doesn’t mean you can’t be murdered. Demons routinely kill the humans which sends their souls back to Limbo. Thomas Fool is one of Hell’s Information Men, a kind of detective who gets his assignments via Hell’s vast bureaucracy and spends most of his time stamping paperwork Did Not Investigate for the many crimes committed by the demons against the humans. As he’s acting as an escort for a couple of angels on an official trip from Heaven, Fool is assigned to look into a brutal and unusual murder where there are no traces of the soul left in the body, and the Information Man finds himself actually following through on an investigation for once which causes ripples of change throughout Hell.
The idea of a detective in Hell could have been the premise for some kind of urban fantasy novel with a Fool being a smart-ass anti-hero with the rough edges of the setting sanded off for easy consumption. However, debut novelist Simon Kurt Unsworth does a very nice job of creating a Hell that really feels like hellish. The descriptions of the graphic violence don’t skimp on the horror, and he’s come up with some truly terrifying types of demons. There's also some nice world building done with Hell's history and how it operates.
What’s best is the tone he hits at making Hell feel like a place devoid of hope in such a regular everyday way that it’s the banality that is ultimately the worst part of it. With a grungy, dismal vibe to the place, and the blah meaninglessness of people doing thankless tasks for a faceless bureaucracy, it’s kind of like Fool is working for a large corporation in an atmosphere with no real pleasure. It's an especially nice touch that none of the humans have any memory of who they were or what their sin was. They just know that they did something they deserve to be punished for. The mystery part seemed kind of obvious to me,but there’s still a great ending I didn’t see coming.
All in all, this was a clever and unique debut novel that makes me hope we’ll be seeing more from Unsworth.
"This rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen KiFrom 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.
It’s pretty telling that for a long time I was snatching up new Walking Dead collections as soon as they came out, but I read Vol. 17 over a year ago It’s pretty telling that for a long time I was snatching up new Walking Dead collections as soon as they came out, but I read Vol. 17 over a year ago and didn’t get around to picking this one up until now.
I used to think that the on-going nature of the comics which enabled it to be an endless fall into the depths of despair was one of the selling points for this series. The idea that things could always get worse and then did made it unique. I thought the format really let them explore just how hopeless a zombie apocalypse could be.
However, after watching the show which seems to be loop of frustration occasionally redeemed by a great episode or ‘Holy shit!’ moment, and the last volume which featured an incredibly brutal and graphic death of a major character, Walking Dead finally popped the fuse controlling my taste for exploring just how bad things can get. At this point the on-going nature has started to work against it for me since I saw no end to the carnage and someday it would be just the last two living people on earth fighting over a can of beans right before being eaten by zombies.
So this storyline featuring Negan and his group of Saviors seemed like we’d just be repeating the whole Governor/prison thing, and I wasn’t that interested. However, this collection does a fair job of trying to establish Negan a bit beyond just another crazy war lord of the zombie apocalypse, and the way that Rick is working on a plan that involves other survivor communities seems like it could offer a bit of hope that the characters of Walking Dead are at long last trying to claw their way out of their daily nightmare instead of just surviving it. ...more
You may not want to shake hands with Miriam Black.
By simply touching anyone Miriam gets a vision of the exact date, time and circumstances of anyone’sYou may not want to shake hands with Miriam Black.
By simply touching anyone Miriam gets a vision of the exact date, time and circumstances of anyone’s death. The bitch of the situation is that she can’t do anything to change it. In fact, by trying to stop it she may actually cause it to occur. Since she feels like a helpless puppet to fate Miriam has taken up a nomadic existence of roaming America’s highways that she funds by being around to loot the wallets and purses of anyone who goes toes up. After she meets a friendly trucker named Louis and gets a vision of his brutal homicide caused by him meeting her a horrified Miriam tries to get away from him. However, events involving con man, a couple of killers, and one creepy drug dealer draw her back to Louis and seem to confirm that fate won’t be thwarted.
This is an odd one in that the main character is simultaneously the best and worst part of the book. The idea of a young woman trying to outrun the gift/curse of being able to know how anyone will die but being helpless to stop it was a helluva of an intriguing concept. It’s certainly understandable that Miriam would turn into a drifter with a bad attitude and a love of booze and cigarettes.
Unfortunately, she drifts a bit too far towards being a glib smart-ass who is delighting in her self-destruction rather than a tragic figure. It’s a difficult line to walk because it’d be tiresome if she was a hand-wringing guilt-ridden mess for the entire book, and there’s a certain charm to her frank appraisal of her situation and her own nature. But at that same time it seemed like she also took a giddy joy in her circumstances that gives her a license to not give a damn. That could be interesting angle for the character too, but it always played as just a bit off to me.
I still enjoyed the book overall. It’s a fast paced supernatural road story with some colorful villains and a nice hook of Miriam’s spooky ability. For being a violent story about death, it’s got some good laughs to it, too. I just wish that Miriam wasn’t quite so delighted in her misery of being fate’s butt monkey. ...more
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 dRemember 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
As a little girl Victoria McQueen has a magical talent for finding things. While riding her bike and focusing on what she’s looking for, Vic can conjuAs a little girl Victoria McQueen has a magical talent for finding things. While riding her bike and focusing on what she’s looking for, Vic can conjure up an old wooden bridge that she can cross and be at the spot where the lost object is. Vic mainly uses her powers to distract herself from the constant fighting of her parents, and she eventually meets an eccentric librarian named Maggie with her own supernatural power who explains that Vic is tapping into imagination itself and plowing tunnels through it.
Maggie also warns Vic about Charlie Manx, another person with special talents who kidnaps children and takes them to a place called Christmasland in his 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith with plates that read NOS4A2. (Or Nosferatu for those of you, like me, who can’t stand not being able to figure out a personalized plate.)
Vic eventually runs across Charlie during her travels, and the encounter doesn’t go well for either of them. Years later, Vic’s adult life has been a steady descent into what seems like madness, but she’s trying to finally repair her relationship with her son when Charlie returns.
It’s probably inevitable that Joe Hill will be compared to his father Stephen King whether it’s fair or not, but the concept and characters seem very much like old school King to me. However, it’s hard to see how Hill could possibly not be influenced by the old man, and in this case, that makes for a tense and fascinating horror novel.
The villains really stood out in this one. Charlie Manx isn’t really a vampire, but he exists in a way by sucking the life out of children. However, since he legitimately sees himself as saving kids from worse fates and providing them with an eternity of fun, it makes him more interesting than just a monster who gets his jollies by murdering kids. Charlie’s sidekick, Bing Partridge, is a simpleton who is terrifying in his role as the Gasmask Man that wants to help Mr. Manx to earn himself a permanent place in Christmasland.
But it’s Vic McQueen that really made me love this story. As a bright kid with a knack for art, it’s painful to see how her ability and meeting Charlie Manx seriously screws her up life. Hill has created a believable and damaged woman who writes and illustrates kid’s books, but also has tattoos and a drinking problem. Vic is a graduate of the Lisbeth Salander Charm School, and she’ll hit you in the face with the wrench she’s using to fix a motorcycle if you give her any grief.
The book has a couple of problems. At almost 700 pages, Joe Hill apparently inherited King’s penchant for writing big books. While the action does move along at a pretty swift pace it still seems like it could have been tightened up. (In Hill’s defense, his stuff moves much faster than his dad. If King would have done this story, it probably would have been 1200+ pages.) There’s also some plot inconsistencies. (view spoiler)[Going across the bridge at the beginning of the book gives Vic blinding headaches and can incapacitate her for days, but at the end she’s doing multiple hops and not suffering nearly as much as she did earlier. With the point that the more you use the gift, the bigger the toll like Maggie’s increasing stammer, you’d think Vic’s head would have exploded well before the end of the book.
I also thought Hill overdid how much physical abuse Vic takes. It made sense that she’d be fairly used up by making it to the final confrontation in Christmasland, but with the beating she took along the way, I had a hard time believing that she was still conscious, let alone able to tear ass around on her motorcycle. (hide spoiler)]
None of my minor gripes prevented me from thoroughly enjoying this very creepy action horror novel with a memorable main character.
One more note, I listened to the audible version of this, and it was narrated by Kate Mulgrew who gave an absolutely incredible reading of it with multiple character voices. It was especially fun because of Vic’s foul mouth which made it sound like Captain Janeway was cursing people like a drunken sailor. Engage, you bastards!
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