Stephen King Book Club

The comic book adaptation of Stephen King's first screenplay is back in print. And while King IS credited for the screenplay, and Bernie Wrightson for the art (he also illustrated Cycle Of The Werewolf), the actual scripter of the adaptation remains uncredited. I have a hard time believing it's actually Stephen King however. His dialogue is usually better than THIS.

Overall: ***.

Now to review the individual stories.

Father's Day

It's sort of humorous, and I get what it's satirizing, but it's mean as hell. That's the problem with the entire comic, if you ask me. **1/2.

The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill

The main character is one of the stupidest fictional characters in a King story (which is saying something).

This was based on a short story by King, and it appears he's so ashamed of it, it doesn't appear in any of his collections. I can see why. *.

The Crate

A particularly nasty story, also based on a short story of King's he's too ashamed to put in a collection.

I get why this isn't in Night Shift. It's absolutely toxic. *.

Something To Tide You Over

I think what King always appreciated about the EC horror comics is that most of them made absolutely no sense. There is no rhyme or reason to the horrible things happening, and stupid and evil people do stupid and evil things just for the heck of it. I think this story is a great example of how unlikely the plots are and how dumb the characters are. ***1/2.

They're Creeping Up On You

This particular story doesn't read well and makes no sense. Perhaps it did in the movie, but in the comic it is incomprehensible. *1/2.

There really is no getting around the fact that this is one of King's worst novels, if you count nothing from Bachman. I think even King knows it, and admits in the (badly-written) forward that he always tells people to stick with the saga through The Drawing Of The Three before deciding to give up on it. The last three books of The Dark Tower turned into a meta affair with Roland meeting a fictionalized version of Stephen King who suggests he paused the saga for so long, and refused to get back to it because Roland Of Deschain, the Gunslinger, scared him. He scares the hell out of me too. His actions in this book are pretty much unforgivable. And I think King got that afterwards, and for the most part spent the next six books having Roland trying to and (mostly) succeeding at redeeming himself. But some of his actions here are so troubling I'm having a hard time believing the character should have been redeemed at all.

King essentially rewrote a LOT of the book, not just because it was badly written and hard to read (and although I've never read the first version I've heard it described as such) but because Roland's actions in the first version ARE not something a reader can forgive. I think him killing the entire town of Tull is absolutely disgusting. But King revised part of it so that Allie begged him to kill her. And the sickest thing about the book is Roland's sexual assault and forced abortion of Sylvia Pittson, and King knew it and tried to add additional story reasons for Roland to do it in the revised version. It doesn't help much, but it helps a little. And of course Roland's betrayal of Jake in particular is something King needed to give him a do-over on in later books.

One of the interesting things to me about this fictional world is that when I see glimpses of the Mid-World that was, and Gilead in its prime, I think it is an absolute pit. I think every inch of the pageantry and caste system of Gilead is vile, unfathomably corrupt, vulgar, and patriarchal. The reason a guy like John Farson was able to amass a bunch of followers preaching freedom and independence is because that's what Mid-World actually desperately needed. It is beyond ironic Farson is a malicious, violent sociopath interested in destroying the Universe, and King made him the bad guy. Because the goals of freedom from the tyranny of the Gunslingers and the Eld are freaking sound. Robin Furth mentions in one of the back-up prose stories in The Dark Tower comics that sending failed gunslingers west in the All-or-nothing gunslinger test is also beyond counterproductive, considering how few pass the test. All Gilead is doing is creating a mass of resentful, yet highly skilled warrior-types ripe for Farson's plucking. Maybe Gilead fell and Mid-World moved on because it should have.

I am sincere in saying this is one of King's worst books. And yet part of me refuses to dismiss it entirely. I wouldn't even under other circumstances since it led to greater things. But the truth is there are flashes of brilliance in the book, and descriptions that King uses that he should be DAMNED proud of. "The Man In Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed," is not just the best opening line to a Stephen King novel. I'm struggling to think of ANY story or novel written by ANYBODY with a stronger or more iconic intro than that. And King describing Roland as a man who fixes crooked pictures in hotel rooms is borderline unhelpful, because there is nothing else about Roland's personality to suggest this. Which is why the description is actually the most helpful thing ever. Jake's "Go then, there are other worlds than these," also gives me chills, and the fact that such a grotesque looking woman as Sylvia Pittson is portrayed so sensually is a pretty unique characteristic for a female character at the time. And I can talk smack about the rest of the book all I want. The truth is, the last 30 page chapter "The Gunslinger And The Man In Black" is amazing for the questions it raises, even the questions the saga itself didn't answer (like about the Ageless Stranger). Walter O'Dim saying about the Stranger that "He darkles. He tincts," is both pure nonsense and pure storytelling magic at the same time.

Believe me, I'm as unhappy about what a heel Roland is as anyone. I don't like following a protagonist who before bedding a desperate woman tells himself it won't be so bad because the scar on her face won't be visible in the dark. And Roland the Gunslinger is pretty much ALL moments like that. And it's kind of both cool and unlikely King not only built a solid epic around this asshat, but sort of made every book he ever wrote fit around the edges of this saga too.

But there is no question in my mind the first Dark Tower book is a dud. A fascinating dud, to be sure, (and with flashes of magic) but a dud nonetheless. *.

Four Novellas by King not dealing with the horror genre. King claims in the Afterward that The Breathing Method is a horror story, but I don't agree with him. I think the gruesome supernatural thing happening is wonderful and uplifting, which means it doesn't belong in the horror genre.

Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption is the best received story in the collection, and I personally love it. Apt Pupil is everything Richard Bachman's Rage COULD have been, but wasn't, because a younger King was a crappy writer. The Body is vastly overrated, and the movie is actually better than the novella. The Breathing Method is a wonderful story too few people have heard of, much less read.

King's Afterward is offensive with his jokey faux-Mexican accent. I mentioned in earlier reviews King's nonfiction was crappy at this stage of his career. That! That!

As far as King books go, it's well, Different, and I appreciated the differences. Collection Overall: 4 stars.

Hope Springs Eternal - Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption

Undoubtedly a major turning point for Stephen King. The best story he has ever written so far, it's also one of the first decent length first-person narratives he's written so far (outside of Rage and The Body). And unlike Charlie Decker, who seemed to be a poor gimmick and parody of how King envisioned a sociopath, Red is King's first fully formed first-perspective character, and one of the few of those characters I believe as a separate and real person from King. No matter the situation described, or the character, young as Charlie Reade, or as old Edgar Freemantle, I find each character has the exact same writing style and speaking voice as King himself. To find King creating a Narrator that sounds like somebody outside of himself is not just an achievement for him. Decade and dozens of books later it remains a rare one.

People swear that The Stand is King's best work (from this period at least) but as great as it is, one of the reasons I love The Stand is because it is a sprawling epic, and some of it is an mess. Every beat of Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption is pitch-perfect.

There are even some casual uses of the n-word by Red, who is white in the story (with Red hair) and it remains Morgan Freeman's favorite book which speaks volumes too. Red is the first character King has written to use that word I don't resent. I still resent KING a little for it. But not Red. Context is everything here, I think.

Red's admiration of Andy Dufresne is made more humorous by the pleasure he takes in telling his larger than life story. Red's an unusual narrator in that he doesn't claim to have all the answers but tells all he knows and offers his best guesses as to what he suspects. What's refreshing is that Red will make clear lines of this for his reader, even though it's clear the only person he'd ever let see this secretly written narrative is Andy himself in the future.

The movie is well-loved but what most people don't really grok is how faithful the movie is to the novella, especially compared to other King adaptations. There are a TON of actual lines from the novella in the actual movie which is VERY rare for King prose. The major differences I noticed are the movie fleshes out the character of Brooks more, and gives his an even sadder ending (Brooks can only be seen for half a page here) which I think is a change for the better. Andy locking himself in the room and playing the opera record is a scene exclusive to the movie (also a change for the better). Tommy is murdered in the movie and in the book is merely transferred (a change for the worse, although perhaps understandable for a film), and Norton commits suicide in the film and only resigns in disgrace here (a push; I see merits in both fates). But I think the biggest change is that the movie shows Red and Andy's reunion briefly at the end, although it's clear to any reader of the story it's obviously in this Red's future too.

This novella is Stephen King at his best and I would argue it's actually the first time we see Stephen King at his best. 5 stars.

Summer Of Corruption - Apt Pupil

As noted, this chilling story is everything Rage should have been, but wasn't. Rage was sophomoric and badly written. The prose here is solid. Rage subversively viewed Charlie Decker's murder spree with a bit of sardonic irony and humor done to minimize the reader's horror at Decker himself. There are subversive humorous elements in Apt Pupil as well, but they perfectly highlight what a monster Todd Bowden is instead. And most importantly, while the entirety of Rage seems to be a how-to guide for a troubled kid for planning a school shooting (and Rage is morally bankrupt enough to suggest those would-be murderers reading the book should and would be loved for it) every conclusion this book reaches about Todd here is harsh and negative.

Rage suffers so much in comparison probably because of its first person perspective. We ONLY view things via Charlie and he thinks the height of coolness is describing a murder spree as "Getting it on", when any actual cool person would correctly call that the lamest catchphrase ever. Apt Pupil having different perspectives by Jews and Nazi-hunters at the end of the book really zeroes home how bad this all is to the reader, which is important and necessary.

And it's bad. Like Rage (and later A Good Marriage), Apt Pupil is one of those stories King has written to court controversy. It feels a bit exploitative in the hot-button issues it pushes. But unlike Rage, it feels like an authentic look at a pair of toxic psychopaths, and more importantly, the scenario, and the people around Todd Bowden and Kurt Dussander feel credible. Morris Weisel's appearance as the guy who recognizes Dussander from the concentration camps he ran is like a breath of fresh air. (He's a genuinely comical character in a story where previously the only funny-seeming things are horrible). And the two detectives looking into Todd are great too. One of them describing Todd as "a creepy kid" was appreciated by me, because really, despite the fact that Todd is white, blonde, athletic, and handsome, the things he says and does would be red flags for anyone who was actually paying attention. Maybe if the guidance counselor Ed didn't suck so much at his job, and wasn't such a gullible idiot, this all would have been found out before it went as far and murderous as it did.

Todd's parents trouble me too, which is why King is a better writer at this stage of his career than he was in Rage. In Rage Charlie's father is abusive, and hearing about that abuse is done to almost justify why Charlie is so messed up and broken. Todd parents being so permissive and understanding is what the reader is eventually led to understand is actually Todd's entire problem, and because they ARE outwardly nice, the reader can't forgive or understand Todd's sociopathy.

Me? I think they explain a lot. Dussander also probably nailed it in his thoughts that though his father would be horrified by the truth, Dick Bowden might wait to call the cops after he was first allowed to excitedly ask Dussander similar questions as his son did. Dick Bowden is not just a racist, but a casual racist, and that rubbed off on Todd just as surely as his aversion to cigarettes and unshaved faces did.

I think the thing I hate most about Todd is that he loses interest in Dussander's stories the second he says something interesting. The "gushy" parts of Dussander's role in the concentration camps are things Todd can't get enough of, but when Dussander starts talking about the U.S.'s police treatment of protestors of the Vietnam War being just as bad as the Nazis, Todd starts yawning. Frankly that was the ONLY time Dussander ever said anything remotely interesting to me, not because I agreed with it, but because I understood the argument. But Todd has no interest with "politics" because he doesn't actually know what the word means, and because he's actually a dull-witted, BORING creep. Dussander's a creep too, but at times he's an interesting one.

One of the biggest things the book suggests is that Todd is a bigger monster than Dussander and always was. I cannot agree more. Todd throws back in Dussander's face that he never did the horrible things he Dussander after Dussander calls him such, but the entire point of the book is that Todd would have in his place. Gleefully. And while Dussander felt a mixture of regret or simple distaste for much of it before he met Todd, Todd himself is "Into It". At the beginning of the books Todd's body count is lower than Dussander's, but his heart has always been FAR blacker.

This a thought-provoking story that pushes the reader's every button. But unlike Rage, I found the controversy riveting, and found both King's portrayal of these two villains, and the conclusions he reaches about their sick parasitic relationship excellent. 4 1/2 stars.

Fall From Innocence - The Body

Years later and mature eyes make me dislike this story. Although if I'm being truthful, I would guess I never really liked it, and sort of got along to get along because everybody else did. I won't lie and say the entire novella is bereft of either insight or good drama. But it's also a celebration of the toxic masculinity of four vulgar and mean-spirited boys who casually toss off sexist, racist, and homophobic remarks, and the adult Narrator telling the story doesn't bother to say he regrets any of it. Him saying at the end he grieved one of the deaths of his friends quietly in his car because if his wife saw him crying it would be p-word just shows Gordon Lachance learned nothing into adulthood.

People will say I'm misunderstanding the story or King's take on childhood friendship. I will counter that those are four extremely crappy children, and if the story is as autobiographical for King as people think it is, it's obvious King hung out with crappy people growing up, and like Gordie, probably secretly looked down on most of them. The main recurring thing King returns to is Chris declaring that "friends hold you down". That sound like the defining ode to childhood friendship the story has gained the reputation for being to you?

And this is probably one of the rare Stephen King stories where the movie is better. I haven't seen the movie in years, but I know it's still better. Because Gordie has the gun in the movie, and it gives him and Ace this following brilliant (and unforgettable) exchange as he points it at him.

Ace (grinning disbelievingly): "What, are you going to shoot all of us?"

Gordie: "No, Ace. Just you."

Bone-chilling moment played to badass perfection by a young Wil Wheaton.

What bothers the hell out of me is that is the kind of scene King himself could have written in his sleep. So it being in the movie and not in the book drives me absolutely crazy.

I think "The Revenge Of Lard-Ass Hogan" plays better in the book because seeing it onscreen is just awful. King also had a better sense of prose writing this old story out in this novella at the time than he did "Stud City" for sure.

And we finally get to "Stud City". If you wanted me to point out why the movie is better, the actual narrative could be more or less identical. And the movie would still be better. Because it doesn't contain Stud City. I'm a writer too. I know what King is referring to about the nervousness, shyness and eagerness of wanting and not wanting people to read your work at the same time he uses Gordie to talk about it. And King (through Gordie) says he's embarrassed by the story for the many reasons it sucks. But he thinks it's the first story that was entirely his. And if that's true of King (who wrote the story years before) I think less of him. I too often find tricks and clever ways to find ways to add various things I wrote as a kid and teenager into my current stories. But my crappy story elements? Of which there are many? I am freaking ashamed of them and you'll never see them again. King has either a severe lack of vanity or a severe lack of judgment for using Stud City of all things as a writing course in what not to do. It's not something he should ever allow us to see. As far as King stories go, it's not as bad as Rage. But it's ostensibly the worst Stephen King story actually still in print. And it taints The Body forever.

Whenever King relates a story from his childhood he always makes the kids he hung out with sound like idiots, which makes it painfully clear that Gordie looking down at Teddy and Vern is done through personal experience. I think the worst thing for me is that I think that Gordie is RIGHT to think so little of them (especially Teddy) which is not something a writer should be making you feel about a character like Gordie, who the author wants you to care about. I don't know. I mentioned in my review of Danse Macabre that King was a snob at this stage of his life, and didn't become as down-to-Earth as he currently is until later in life (and after he got clean). The moral of the veneration of Gordie and Chris over their dumb friends doesn't sit right with me for this reason.

I didn't hang out with rocket scientists as a kid. But none of them ever nitpicked any of the stories I wrote as a kid the way Vern and Teddy do The Revenge Of Lard-Ass Hogan. Maybe it's because people growing up in the 1980's were slightly savvier than those who grew up in the 1960's, but I look back at the dreck we watched and realized that cannot be it. And truthfully, nothing I wrote was as brilliant as the Lard-Ass Hogan story. Those friends tended to accept any old way I ended a story, and I never felt appalled because they didn't "get me". The Lard-Ass Hogan story isn't some high art that is above the sophistication of mortal rubes, and if King is saying it is, I don't know what to tell him other than I disagree that a dumb person being upset at that specific story having a sudden, ambiguous ending is believable to me. If that were true, The Princess Bride wouldn't be as universally beloved as it is. King looks down at a certain segment of readers at this stage of the game, and it always bothers the heck out of me. Especially because I don't believe anyone who uses the p-word or the n-word as King always does would ever be competing for the position of Rhodes Scholar himself anyways.

Sigh. It's arguably the most famous story from the collection, but I actually think it's the worst. 2 stars.

A Winter's Tale - The Breathing Method

This is not the best story in the book, but it's the most underappreciated. Why? Because it's the one fewest people have even heard of. There is supposedly a movie for it currently in development, and if you ask me that's long overdue.

The double narrative of the framing story of David Adley at the Club switching to McCarron's perspective shouldn't work and yet weirdly does. McCarron's story is somehow shockingly grim and uplifting at the same time. And the gruesome ending is also weirdly funny on some level. McCarron's depth of feelings for Sandra Stanfield are amazing, and when a dude interrupts the story once to ask if he was in love with her, McCarron calls it a fair question, and answers that he wasn't, although he admits later on there were points in which it COULD have happened. She is after all one amazing woman.

I think the thing in Sandra's story that struck me as the cruelest is her describing the "magic" of a two dollar wedding ring. There is no reason on Earth it should make the difference between a pregnant women being treated kindly or like a pariah, and back then it did. For some people it still does, but I like to think society has evolved past the point where that is EVERYONE'S reaction anymore. I not only admire Sandra for her courage and determination to be a mother on her own terms, I admire McCarron for finding it admirable to begin with.

The hook of the story is of course the Nameless Club that David Adley joins but becomes too frightened to ask deep questions about. David suggests at the end that someday he might tell another tale from the Club, but King only returned to the Club once more in the pretty good story "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" and that story wasn't related by David. There seems to be so much unfinished business and uncharted territory that it feels like a bit of a missed opportunity King hasn't returned to the world of the ageless butler Stevens more than once, much less hinted at any possible connections the club might have to The Dark Tower or the Todash space of The Mist. The Club would make a much more comfortable Evergreen franchise for King than returning repeatedly to Holly Gibney has wound up being.

The Club is cool because some of the unspoken rules and expectations seem neat. Like when Stevens asks David if he can get him another brandy, David says "No thank you," and he can swear Stevens looks pleased at that. What a great, small detail to ponder over, isn't it?

I truly adore this story. 4 stars.

This is slightly better than its reputation suggests it is.

Stephen King himself was a little disappointed by all of the negative critical notices, and while I will acknowledge it is a flawed book, those flaws are structural and not actually down to a bad story. You want further proof, this is one of the few horror books of his from this era that actually turned into a pretty decent movie. And the film didn't change much of the story at all.

The book has structural problems. And King's methods for "solving" them are both noticeable and clunky as hell. King has repeated the story that the thing that got him over the writing block for The Stand was the bomb that killed off half of the good guys. That's not a brag to have to destroy your story to "fix" it. Likewise Dennis being conveniently waylaid in the hospital for a football injury because he doesn't have much to do in the middle of the book, and because he needs to be weakened in order for Christine to have a fighting shot at the end, isn't a good solution either. And the fact that the first part of the book is told by Dennis himself, the second randomly switches to third person for different characters, and the third part back to Dennis drives me batty. Maybe it wouldn't have if King didn't take such a huge unforgivable shortcut and had Dennis say about Leigh relating the story about how she almost died in Christine as something "the reader has heard before". How does Dennis as the writer of the autobiography of the first and last part have ANY idea what King's Narrator told us in the second? It's sloppy as hell and bothers me not because it raises a mystery. But because it raises a mystery in which no good answer is possible.

If I had written the book, I would have written the entire thing third person from different perspectives. But I do see why King was so torn, and wanted Dennis' voice for a lot, if not most of it. Dennis is really the only person who believably tells us cool things about how Arnie Cunningham used to be. Without Dennis' reports of their childhood friendship together there is no sympathy to be had for Arnie, and pretty much every current action he takes in the book is unforgivable. The only reason Arnie is compelling and sympathetic is because Dennis gives him that context. Which would be hard for Dennis to give us in a third person narrative and not feel right. Instead King split the Narrative difference and an admittedly solid story feels like it's being told wrong.

There's so much about the story I like. I like how on-the-ball both Darnell and Detective Junkins are. And I like that King gives the lesser characters interesting facets. Regina Cunningham is Arnie's greatest nemesis over his obsession with that damn haunted car, but it's his father's measured (and increasingly depressed) reactions that I relate to. The guy is breaking down in the background, while Regina is publicly cracking up. And I sympathize more with Michael for it while part of me finds Regina as domineering and unpleasant as Arnie and ultimately Dennis do.

I also love that King had it so that one of Dennis' father's hobbies is making toys in his spare time. It adds nothing to the horror or the narrative other than that it's a cool detail about why Dennis digs his father and has a happy family life. It's a lot of good little things like that that make a great story. And even if I disagree with how King chose to tell it, John Carpenter proved it's a great story.

King has theorized part of its poor reception might be due to the fact that the hero is headed towards a bad ending. and like Cujo and Pet Sematary, it's one of his books that is unpopular solely because the bad guys win. I don't agree with King. I'm not talking about theories about why people didn't like the book. I disagree Dennis Guilder is definitely headed for a bad end. I would not bet against the guy, and whatever King claims after the fact, the truth is destroying Christine was ONLY an arduous prospect for both Dennis and Leigh because Dennis was literally physically incapacitated. Uncle Stevie, you want me to believe Dennis Guilder is a Dead Man Walking? Don't make it so that ALL of his failures in the final battle are due to either his ankle injuries flaring up or his tripping on his makeshift driving crutches. I would not bet against a healthy Dennis with two working legs.

The best part is, and the reason I think King's theory about the book's bad reception is wrong, is that King kindly left the ending ambiguous and up to the reader to decide. And I would not be surprised if a bunch of them hoped for the best instead of predicting the worst. If people really DIDN'T dig the book, I don't think it was because of a supposed downer ending. Because any future bad end is purely speculative, and not something I personally share myself.

I mentioned there are mostly structural flaws in the book rather than the story. But King famously writes most of his stuff as it comes to him, and I don't really think he had a firm idea about Rollie Le Bray at the beginning of the book, much less planned to turn him into the Big Bad and Ultimate Evil haunting Christine when he's introduced. I don't like that King writes that way, because when he doesn't have a great copy editor (and I'd argue the guy editing that not noticing the HUGE differences in how Le Bray is portrayed in the beginning of the book in real life and by the end as a ghost fell asleep at the switch) it FEELS like it was made up as it went along. And good story or no, Le Bray feels likes a work-in-progress the entire book instead of a fully formed idea for a character from the outset.

I thought Buddy Pepperton's last joyride with his pals was super interesting in the way King treated his racism. He makes a couple of off-color racist remarks, and the new guy in the crew make an N-word joke, and Buddy gets super offended and calls him a racist and scares the guy to death even before Christine grinds them all into a pulp. King is not what I'd call racially sensitive, especially during this early part of his career. But him noticing white racists are often the first to take ownership of being against overt bigotry when dogwhistles stop being used is accurate. King is an ass when it comes to how he treats black characters. But when it comes to a specific type of white racist? Yeah, Buddy is of an existing, realistic sort of racist I recognize. For sure. I live in Massachusetts. That's pretty much EVERY white racist here. And there are a TON of them. And I'd guess about half of them still vote for Democrats. Crazy state.

I have NO idea how King licensed so many song lyrics for the chapter headers. He couldn't do that today. He'd be spending a mint on Beatles lyrics alone. It's both crazy and impressive what you could get away with back then when music companies used to be cool about this sort of thing.

I think this is a pretty good book in hindsight. 3 1/2 stars.

We have a lot to talk about.

As praised as this book is as the scariest thing Stephen King has ever written, in interviews and even the forward here, I get the deep sense King greatly dislikes the book. If it had sold as poorly and gotten as bad of a reception as Rose Madder or The Tommyknockers I can picture King talking your ear off over how much he hates it. Because it resonated with so many people, King actually uses the forward to explore why he wrote such a horrific book, and suggests the book terrifies him so much because it is a dark real life "What If?" scenario from an actual moment in his life.

I have my share of grievances with Stephen King and the things he chooses to portray in his writing. Knowing however, that he is the kind of person who occasionally gets upset over something he's written makes me forgive a LOT I otherwise wouldn't.

My take on the book is closer to King's than his fans'. Rereading every King book and story I own is daunting, especially knowing I'll have to reread things I don't want to. Pet Sematary was near the top of the list of King books I hate revisiting (second place is Revival). It's a bigger bummer to me and harder to get through than some books he's written that are legitimately terrible. It's the conviction and surety King uses when writing this horrible book that sets it apart from the random downer endings from his short fiction in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew. I will argue the bad endings King show there are done because King was a crappy writer at that stage of his career, or at least as far as short fiction usually went. It's super easy to pile on horrible things and end the story with the main character dying. It takes no talent to tell that kind of story. King is a MAJOR fan of EC horror comics, but I'm not. I find their stories incredibly lazy, and the comic adaptation of Creepshow solidified that opinion. But Pet Sematary is memorable because it's a well-written book that has the horrible things occur in a logical fashion to strengthen the characters and the narrative. The characters don't all die at the end because King was stuck for a way to get them out of their perils. Instead, the entire book, and Louis Creed's escalating madness is leading up to it, and as everything goes just as badly as it possibly could in the climax, you realize it couldn't have ended any other way.

I'm speaking of the story King has told by the way. King is sort of hinting around the edges that the evil forces of the Micmac Burial Ground and the Wendigo are deliberately setting things up to bring back a demon Gage Creed and drive his father insane. And while I respect the Narrative for following its own path it set out to, I must say I don't believe Jud's idea that larger forces than he could possibly fathom are conspiring to allow this horror to occur. I think the horror occurring is down to one guy: Louis Creed. A selfish, weak, cowardly man who actually knows better the entire time. He isn't tricked into this. He's made deliberate and poor choices of his own volition. Steve at the end was able to resist the temptation of the force and that was it for him. If Louis had even attempted that once, none of that nonsense would have happened.

King has a knack for creating and writing famously crappy husbands. But unlike Jack Torrance and Burt from Children Of The Corn, Louis' failings in his marriage aren't down to malice or passive-aggression on his end. It's in his cowardice and weakness. I found it very interesting that King essentially told this "That coulda been me!" cautionary tale using a hapless schmuck for his stand-in. And from what I know of King, he would never have made the same terrible decisions Louis Creed does in his place. I'm wondering if he "jerked up" the surrogate character a bit to feel a little more comfortable in punishing him. To be honest, I hate the grim ending myself. But I thank God it happened to a character I widely disliked and half-believed had it coming to them rather than someone I cared about.

Truly the thing I hate and resent most about Louis is that King also handed us a character with almost NO redeeming virtues in Rachel's father. His behavior at the funeral is disgusting and unforgivable. I resent the fact that Louis basically spent the climax of the book proving that loathsome monster right about how worthless he was and how he ruined his daughter's life. That jag should not be right about ANYTHING, much less the biggest, most significant thing.

What especially kills me is how outraged Louis is on child Rachel's behalf over her parents insensitivities to Zelda's death. And while he's bemoaning what a sack of crap his father-in-law is for putting his wife through that, Louis himself does the exact same damn thing to her and daughter Ellie later on. It's infuriating.

King does a LOT of subtle things in the book to hint that Louis sucks all along. There is a throwaway line I am astounded exists, and I think it's equal parts sucky and brilliant. I think King knows how bad it is and is making a statement by including it. But the idea that Louis once visited a whore 6 years ago, believes it meant nothing, and only remembers it the once says that Louis is a terrible husband and father. Jud has a similar perspective regarding his extramarital dalliances, but I get the sense that Jud regrets them, and that King is using them as an example of a bad thing about the character. Louis not actually have a bigger reaction to having done that, much less guilt says a LOT to me about what kind of man he actually is.

Rachel saying she learned THAT in the Girl Scouts strikes me as far scarier than anything else in that book. Real crowd-pleasing laughline back in the day, in a book not known for its humor.

Whenever I read Jud Crandall's dialogue in my head, his voice is Sam Elliott's. Not sure why.

I think King takes complaints of any bummer endings he delivers very seriously from his fans. And regardless of those complaints, as far as this book goes, his canon is better for it existing. He is a horror writer. He's a weirdly optimistic one, unafraid to let the heroes win or even given them a happy ending. But there is no actual horror or stakes involves if ALL of his heroes make it through to the other side. He needs to show actual losses for protagonists in his work occasionally, or any horror tension the reader is invited to feel isn't real. King is usually a kind enough writer to pull back on the horror by the end of the book. But sometimes he HAS to simply go for it, as ugly as it is, to give everything else proper stakes. I don't much enjoy reading this book, but I do admire it for that reason.

And the truth is, despite me talking down the idea that the predestiny element is a sham, King's writing has seldom been this assured. The brutal things he shows are devastating because they are things that SHOULD be happening in this particular story with as lily-livered a "hero" as Louis Creed. King dislikes what the book reveals about himself. I actually find his writing in it quite truthful. And yeah, I agree a lot of it is so gruesome I won't think better of King's mental health for it. But the bad things happening in the book SHOULD happen, which is the highest compliment I can give a book that goes the exact opposite way anyone reading it could ever have wanted it to.

I'm not inclined to give something that unpleasant a high grade. But I also won't dismiss it or pretend it is without merit. And I think King occasionally refusing to pull back on the horror is the reason his reader's know that when it comes to horror, he DOES actually mean business. **1 removed link

I don't know. This specific King story feel a bit CONSTRAINED in a way little of the rest of his stuff does. He had to keep the action to one night a month. The chapters are short because it's an illustrated book (and Bernie Wrightson does a fabulous job at that). The present tense narration is something King goes back to later in Black House and Mr. Mercedes, but it feel less immediate here, and more amateurish instead.

And while I like the boy hero of wheelchair-bound Marty Coslow, none of the other characters in the book are particularly likable or memorable. Although Reverend Lowe is a pretty good villain.

What surprised me most about this book being so underwhelming when I first read it a couple of years ago is that I believe the movie adaptation Silver Bullet is pretty great. Few movies based on King's work are better than the actual work outside of maybe The Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me, and okay, Christine. But I dug Silver Bullet and yawned at this.

Of course I saw Silver Bullet years ago, and who knows if I'd still like it? But the Lowe reveal in that movie was WAY cooler.

King acknowledges in the afterward he fudged the timeline of the lunar cycle. The thing is just because he acknowledges that mistake, doesn't make it an all right or forgivable mistake, intentional or not. Sometimes in fiction, a writer pointing out the error themselves makes you forgive it a little. Instead it seems to me here a case of King knowing better and simply admitting his laziness, (which isn't admirable at all).

The artwork is cool but the prose by King is an actual misfire. **1 removed link

The Talisman got a bit of a bad rap in the 1980's. It was hyped as being the long awaited team-up of the two horror greats of the era, and it's more of a quest fantasy than a horror book. More importantly, it's not a great, mind-blowing book. It most certainly did not live up to the hype.

In hindsight, reviews have been more favorable, especially knowing, seeing, and understanding its important connections to The Dark Tower. Best of all, its sequel Black House was an outright fantastic book, and for my money the best book with Stephen King's name on it, so it feels richer for a set-up for that.

I think the actual value of the book is somewhere in the middle. But Full Disclosure: The book actually influenced a couple of important things about Gilda And Meek And The Un-Iverse. I took a LOT of Reverend Vic Puff's speech patterns from Sunlight Gardener, and while my Werewolves are nothing like The Talisman's version, the thing I did mirror is the idea that they were a real-live group and society with their own traditions and beliefs, and not simply humans who go nuts on the full moon.

I don't think Morgan Sloat is that great of a villain, but the interesting thing is I find the other villains quite amazing. Osmond, I remembered everything about the guy from when I first met him as a teenager. And while King already took shots at religious fundamentalism in Carrie, and rightwing populism in The Dead Zone, Gardener is like the worst nightmare version of both of those things, and King and Straub very deliberately portray both things as negative things, and the preachers of them as hateful and hypocritical. King takes stands against the right in his fiction plenty of times, but there is absolutely no nuance in it in Gardener for the first time ever. King doesn't bother making anything about either his character or his philosophy ambiguous.

Wolf is an amazing character, and his death is one of the few moments in a prose book that has ever made my cry. I still get misty-eyed over it, even if I no longer sob. It's effecting in a way no other death in a Stephen King book ever is. Good old Wolf. He's both hilarious and lovable. He's arguably the most lovable character King ever wrote.

Aside from The Sunlight Home, and great villains like Osmond/Sunlight, as well as the goat man Elroy, the interesting thing about The Talisman is that is has really memorable set pieces and places. That's perhaps to be expected in a Quest-style book, but I remember Jack's adventures in the Oatley Tunnel, The Oatley Tap, The Sunlight Home, Thayer Academy, The Blasted Lands, and the Black Hotel in a way I do few other set pieces in the rest of King's fiction. I'll go so far to say that all that stuff is actually more memorable than most of the stuff from the seven book Dark Tower series. I won't say it's BETTER than it. But it's definitely more memorable. The Talisman is like the only King book I can think of that would make a decent videogame where each place Jack travels to would constitute a level.

The allegory of the Pitcher Plant for Smokey Updike and the Oatley Tap is fabulous and that scenario is the second most hellish in the book after the Sunlight Home.

I love Lily Cavanaugh as much as Jack does. Most quests don't bother to make the damsel in distress have such a great personality, but Jack's Mom's a tough cookie.

Jack's journey through the Oatley Tunnel has been compared t\o the pitch black trek through the Lincoln Tunnel Larry Underwood goes though in The Stand. I have to say The Oatley Tunnel scenario is better because you understand the bumps in the dark and terror of not actually being alone are actually REAL, while the most of Larry's terror involved his imagination going nuts.

I don't know if this is a problem for Straub, but one of the weaknesses of the book is the sense of repetition of key phrases, which is a weird crutch King used at this stage of his career. It's a narrative flourish I've never seen another author use, so I think everybody else must actually find "Six, six, when Jacky was six," as off-putting as I do.

Bad things. I mentioned Sloat isn't a good villain. I do believe that. I also think Richard Sloat is a lousy sidekick.

Wolf was indeed as big of a hindrance to Jack's journeys as Richard wound up being. The difference is Wolf's hang-ups were understandable and sympathetic. For most of the time Rational Richard is denying the reality in front of him you want to smack him over the head and say "Ignoring actual reality because it threatens your belief system is antithetical to the scientific method! You are giving all rational people a bad name!" In the book's defense his and Jack's eventual brotherhood by the end is kinda great, but it's a slog to get there.

King has mentioned that when he can't terrify or horrify, he goes for the gross-out. The white bugs crawling out of the walls, then Reuel Gardener's head, then Richard's freaking FACE are some of the grossest visuals he's ever come up with. Again, I don't know much about Peter Straub, but something tells me that stuff is pure King.

The stuff in the Sunlight Home is amazing although I suppose I would have liked a more detailed resolution about the fall-out from that, particularly the reaction from Ferd Janklow's horrible parents who got their brilliant and independent son killed. Wolf crushing Heck Bast's hand is beyond cathartic, as is his final rampage as he sacrifices himself to rescue and free Jack. Andy Warwick being the major villain survivor from the home felt interesting because he was the only one smart enough to say "Sonny, we should untie him, people won't understand, we'll get in trouble," when he heard the police sirens. Sonny Singer being dumb enough to scream to Wolf that he's a big man as his arm is ripped off tells me the right villains are surviving.

I mentioned how great Gardener is, but Osmond is memorable because of his mincing and prancing and his whip, and most of all for the horrible odor King and Straub beautifully describe to the reader. It's both heavily perfumed and as if he never took a bath. What a great horrible description. I actually can smell him. I also love the way he shrieks out words on the longest, most drawn out way possible DOOOOONNN'T YOOOOUUUU???!!!

Elroy, or the dude who looks like Randolph Scott, is less well-defined, but the goat horror visuals he puts into my head are still freaky.

Buddy Parkins was a neat character it was cool to see called back in News From Everywhere.

Speaking of that, one thing I've always loved about the book is that it has great chapter titles. News From Everywhere is great, as are Jack In The Box, Wolf In The Box, and In Which Many Things Are Resolved On The Beach, and the Part titles The Road Of Trials and A Collison Of Worlds are boss too. I always admire a project with good titles, be they episode titles or chapter headings, and The Talisman has 'em. My only real disappointment with Black House was that none of the chapters are titled. Bummer.

Do I have any complaints? Quite a few. For one thing, I feel the book is too free with the n word. For King, that was one of the ways he showed bad guys were bad guys at that stage of his career. But he's doing more than that. I think the thing that makes me upset is that Jack believes he can hear the bigoted desk clerk repeatedly thinking "n-word lover" running off of him in waves for seeing him hug Speedy Parker. The thing is, that use of the n-word is entirely in Jack head, and frankly based on what we've seen of that bigoted Clerk, Jack could be wrong for the specific reason he's emanating hatred. He might simply be a homophobe. The racist nature of the clerk is not evident in anything he says. His one harsh statement is homophobic. And if Jack is projecting that specific word to him on his own, that's freaking problematic.

Also I can't think of a single positive thing to say about Snowball. The fact that Jack believes the only other black character in the story looks like and thus must BE secretly Speedy isn't just ridiculous and unbelievable. It's offensive too.

I found Speedy himself problematic as well. Forget his race, and the desk clerk's homophobia. I don't believe strange men should be hugging boys they barely know for any reason. I also think even if Speedy sets Jack on his quest because he knows he's the only one who can do it, he still sucks for putting all that responsibility on the kid in the first place, and he even goes so far as to make Jack feel ashamed for not wanting to go through all this. He's manipulative in that regard. I also am skeeved at the fact that he allows Jack into his shack while their are nude pictures of women on the walls. He also carefully watches Jack as he examines them too which is appalling. King and Straub want us to feel disgust over the homophobic Clerk, but that right there is actual grooming behavior for abusers. I don't like making an adult outside observer thinking this kid is way too physically close with the groundskeeper the bad guy for being upset at a true thing. And I also don't like that King and Straub decide to have the Clerk turn his judgment about that against Jack instead of Speedy (where it belongs).

The Sloat In This World Interludes were the weakest part of the book, and I always wanted to get back to Jack during them. The one exception was the third one where we actually see Orris In The Territories. Learning about Orris taking over Sloat and experiencing things like McDonalds for the first time was kind of cool and funny.

For some reason, when the first thing Jack tells Richard upon popping up at Thayer is that he just came from the Sunlight Home, two of his friends died there, and one of them was a Werewolf, I found that vulgar. It's totally consistent with what a little kid would do, but Jack ISN'T exactly a little kid anymore, and his impersonal description to Richard of Wolf as "get this, a Werewolf" feels disrespectful for Wolf's heroism and sacrifice. It sort of like Jack is bragging about the unusual experience of meeting a member of Wolf's species, instead of how meaningful knowing Wolf himself was. That being the first thing he said to Richard doesn't just bug me now. It always bugged me, even as a teenager for that exact reason.

I feel like the reason people demanded a sequel was probably because the ending was so sudden and ambiguous and there was little to no actual wrap-up. It makes for a good literary experience, but it's frustrating, especially because the book is so damn long otherwise. If Twin Peaks were a 2 hour movie nobody would complain about the frustrating, mysterious cliffhanger endings. Because it's a series that lasted over 30 episodes, it's annoying instead. There should be different expectations over how to end a long book than there are a short book. This is also a problem King had with Under The Dome.

This is better than people said it was at the time. But I don't really agree with legacy reviews arguing the book is actually great either. It's good, but it has quite a few problems. ****.

I think Robin Furth is great, but I think The Talisman is the weakest of the comic adaptations of Stephen King's novels.

The Chapter Zero prologue is actually the only really interesting issue of the brief run, and since I actually like it, I'll talk about the failures of the miniseries in later reviews.

I think the prologue works because it's the only part of the comic that deals with ostensibly "new" material, or at least stuff discussed by the book, but that happened in the past without Jack Sawyer present. It's interesting for that reason. Perhaps of the comic had continued we would have seen another issue like it. But for now, it's the only Chapter I actually like. 4 stars.

The fact that the adaptation tries to do the entire first part "Jack Lights Out" in a single issue is why the comic doesn't work.

The scenes are so truncated and randomly connected, that if one hadn't read the book I suspect they'd be lost. The characters barrel from one major scene to another with barely any pause to consider what is happening to them. The fact that the adaptation makes Jack's goodbye scene with Lily last a single page means we are skimping out on real drama and pathos to save page space.

It's weird how the terrible taste of the magic juice isn't really addressed. Jack actually HATES it in the book.

Not good. 1 1/2 stars.

Osmond's design is all right. I probably would have made it more elaborate and not given him blonde or long hair. But the design is credible.

The rest of the issue is workmanlike and soulless, with little to no effort put into creating a coherent story in its own right. 2 stars.

The scene at the end of the trees is clumsy at best. But truly the most disappointing thing in the issue is the confrontation between Osmond and Jack. Aside from an inadequate description of his odor (gee, he smells like "old sweat", how awful) there is no dramatic tension to it. Osmond is a mere encounter, not an actual dangerous threat. And Jack never thinks of Lily wisecrackingly telling him not to spill his guts to This Guy, nor promises in his head to get him back simply because he "hurt" him. That revenge motive was so basic and understandable in the book, especially from a kid, it's galling it's gone.

Osmond also has far less personality and speaks far less theatrically than in the book. No extended girlish SHRIIEEEEEEEEKSSSSS!!

In Furth's favor she remembers to put in the scene of Jack telling Farren he was afraid and didn't WANT to fetch the Talisman, but Farren changes his mind so easily there is actually no conflict there or even character development for Jack. This adaptation is wholly inferior to the book in every conceivable way. 1 star.

I cannot overstate how terrible that was.

The thing that kills me is the artwork is all right. Elroy's goat form is at least, as is Smokey Updike's design. But The Stand took great pains to center an entire issue around the Lincoln Tunnel scene, and make it scary in comic book form (and damn it, they DID!) and Robin Furth devotes two lousy pages to The Talisman's version of that in The Oatley Tunnel scene. Which was frankly, the scariest scene in the book. It's totally ruined here. They didn't even try.

Also Elroy's human form is supposed to look like Randolph Scott. That he doesn't is an artwork failing.

The issue also does not remotely get across how thoroughly Smokey has trapped Jack and made him his prisoner through threats and blackmail. The beautiful Pitcher Plant allegory is entirely missing, so the reader doesn't understand that Jack is his prisoner the moment he sits down, or even why he doesn't ran off earlier.

But really the worst thing is how easily Jack DOES run off. And it's a bit disturbing how badly that turnaround is written. Furth is usually better than this. But Jack saying "I want to go home," only to pivot entirely to say "I have to save my mom! I have to find the Talisman!" is bad writing. That latter thing astounds me frankly, especially in an Mature-Rated comic. It's the kind of hokey dialogue you'd see in an X-Men comic in the 1980's. But frankly, I might actually be insulting the X-Men there. I haven't read a TON of 80's X-Men comics but none of them I HAVE read ever had the characters speak so obviously and badly.

I think the worst thing about the issue is that it SHOULDN'T be this bad, and probably wouldn't be if Furth were afforded the room for the story to breath The Dark Tower and The Stand comics were allowed.

But even the fact that the comic tries to tell too much story with too few issues doesn't entirely explain this level of bad writing. The Adaptation of Sleeping Beauties, was similarly shortened. The difference there is instead of giving the characterization short shrift, the story made certain story points less complicated. The characterization never suffered as much as it does in this adaptation.

Probably the worst issue. 0 stars.

The design of The Men In The Sky look all right on the surface, but without the descriptions from the book about how much effort that pageantry takes out of them, the scene is random and pointless.

You want proof the story is being told too fast? Wolf is at the end of the fifth (and last, since it was canceled) issue! That's pure craziness!

Snowball is wisely skipped, probably not just because of political correctness, but also because this adaptation is already confusing enough.

"He escaped to the Territories!" Yes, Ted, that was the joke. Who writes this crap? Certainly not Stephen King or Peter Straub.

The title was canceled due to poor sales. I'm guessing however that the reason sales were poor is because the book actually was. 1 star.

This is not a Richard Bachman novel. This is essentially a signed confession from Stephen King. It annoys me how whiny King is about the Bachman pseudonym being busted. "Bachman was supposed to be in it for the long haul!" he cries. You wanted to protect Bachman, Uncle Stevie? Maybe take better care of him.

King's problem is he believed his own fans were smarter than Bachman's fans. And that's probably true for most of them. But not for ALL of them. And when he uses phrases like "wool-gathering", "black lungers", or "stroke books" which by the way are only phrases I've heard King himself use, people are going to put two and two together. Houston's stories about amazing and gross medical oddities are also the kinds of things only Stephen King really obsesses over too. Worse, the characters actually mention King by name at one point. It's like King is rubbing his face in how stupid he thinks Bachman's readers are and I'm like "Serves you right you got found out. Big time."

How is the book? It's got a bad reputation, and the bad things about it are still there, but it also has some selling points I can appreciate with some time and distance. The biggest fault is of course the ending. It's a Stephen King book with a Richard Bachman ending that simply doesn't fit the story told, or the characters we've grown to care about. And in one of King's hackiest twists ever, he delivers the happy ending, but pulls back on it and reveals it's a dream as Halleck wakes up to the awful truth. It also makes the entire struggle of the book feel pointless.

What I don't think the book gets enough credit for is the awareness of prejudice against Romani the book instilled in the reader. This was literally the first time I had ever heard that using the g-word to say you were cheated was a racial slur against Romani. I said that word a LOT as kid not knowing what it meant. Once I read that part of the book I stopped using that word. And I read the book in the early 1990's.

The other thing is something King won't get too much credit for because it wasn't done under his name. But I think the mobster Ginelli, Halleck's White Man's Curse himself, is one of the most fascinating secondary characters King ever came up with. He steals the book the instant he appears, and his story is riveting for how thorough and cunning he is in covering his tracks. I can tell King really enjoyed writing an entire monologue that was essentially exposition of where Ginelli had been and the elaborate things he did to stay alive and get Lemke to take off the curse. The thing that interests me most about Ginelli is something I think frightened King a bit, so he pulled back on it a little. But I don't exactly agree with the conclusions either he or Halleck reached.

By the end Halleck notices a disturbing madness in Ginelli's eyes, and can tell he's having the time of his life, and wonders if he's even doing all this for him. But I think Ginelli IS, whether he demurs that idea or not. I think what happened was the fact that Ginelli wound up so brave, and heroic, and loyal, and the only person Halleck could count on made King nervous, not just because of his abhorrent tactics. But because the first thing we learn about him is he had two witnesses killed that were going to testify against him. Him treating Halleck like a friend and a brother and a real person after the crappy way his wife and doctor had been making him feel crazy is more interesting to me BECAUSE Ginelli is a bad guy. Ultimately King cannot give Ginelli the credit for helping Halleck for the right reasons. But both his lecture about believing what he sees, and not running from Halleck's grotesque skeletal visage to begin with, says this is a bad man capable of great good and kindness for the right people. It's a very fascinating idea that I wish King had actually stuck with. Billy Summers says if King wrote that book 30 years later he would have done just that.

Heidi is a despicable character on every level, that it's annoying the unhappy ending is that Halleck isn't allowed to murder her free and clear and the entire family has to suffer. Halleck increasingly begins to believe the entire situation is Heidi's fault, and I think he's think he's right. King set up an EC Comics level of just revenge killing and ultimately chickened out because the notion of that being a happy ending frightened him, and besides Bachman characters aren't allowed happy endings anyways. But us not getting the happy ending feels like random bad luck instead of just desserts (pun intended) so I hope King will forgive his readers for finding it a load of crap. Which is it by the way.

Basically once Ginelli is killed off for no reason, the book loses me, and the crappy ending is just the turd frosting on the cake. The book has some cool things going for it, but King was suffering from a split personality when he wrote it, and ultimately decided to have Richard Bachman ruin a perfectly acceptable Stephen King book. Because it's a Stephen King book. Full stop. He wasn't fooling anyone. **1 removed link

My opinion (which might not be worth much) is that The Eyes Of The Dragon is the best Stephen King book from the 1980's and this stage of his career. I think Misery is good, The Talisman decent, and although The Dark Tower: The Drawing Of The Three IS problematic, its climax is still dynamite. But I will seriously argue The Eyes Of The Dragon is the only GREAT book King wrote in this time period.

Ironically, most of his fans at the time hated it, and that sort of crushed him. I can see why considering how great the book is. But back then King was pigeonholed as a horror writer and his fans wanted more of the same, even as each book got progressively worse due to King's increasing drug habit. But King finds a fresh, funky premise and is hated for it. Misery was in fact partly written in response to that.

Seriously, they were mad that it seemed like a children's book. Me? I don't think fans of the books Pet Sematary or Firestarter deserve to fancy themselves literary snobs of any sort.

King insists this is a Dark Tower story. I am with Robin Furth in believing it doesn't fit. But it definitely takes place on a different level of the Tower and King Multiverse. It's not of Roland Deschain's Mid-World, but it is Mid-World-adjacent.

The unnamed Narrator who refers to himself as the Storyteller was always my favorite part of the book. Omniscient Narrators with personality are rare and it's wonderful here because the Storyteller gives you a fuller picture than in most of King's other books. And this specific Narrator along with the one from Arrested Development sort of influenced my Narrator from Gilda And Meek. A lot of the tale also influenced The Pontue Legacy (particularly Roland's name).

I am annoyed King never gave those unimaginative and finicky fans the middle finger and delivered either the sequel the "tale for another day" phrase promises on the last page, or a related story about the priest Curran who we know nothing about, other than the fact that the Storyteller tells us his is a story worth someday telling. I would lose my marbles of King returned to this world. Maybe detailing the adventure Roland Deschain describes in The Drawing Of The Three when he met Dennis and Thomas and they all confronted Flagg. Figuring out a way to traverse worlds and make it fit into the Mid-World saga would be a gas to read 40 years later.

The version of Flagg is the scariest version of them all. He's even nastier than Walter O'Dim and doesn't seem to have Randall Flagg's wry sense of humor as of yet. He gives me the creeps as does the concept of the Dragon Sand poison. Only Stephen King could come up with something like that. It's pure evil.

The Storyteller often gets overexcited and spoils upcoming parts of the story before he should, which is crazymaking. But the Storyteller offering his opinions on characters' mindsets is also very handy.

I think Stephen King is having a bit of a laugh with the character of Anders Penya's butler Arlen. The Storyteller takes pains to say Arlen NEVER licks his lips and that specific thing is unheard of, as if that will impress the reader about this character we just met and know nothing about. Paul Sheldon wrote a similar hacky character in the novel-within-the-novel Misery's Return which is why I think King is having us on a bit there.

I AM glad that King decided against naming the story The Napkins after all. Although on some level the name is perfect (the story has more to do with the napkins than Niner's eyes) I'm still glad he changed it to this. It does not remotely hint at the possible scope of this tale.

King wrote this book for his young daughter Naomi because she always complained he never wrote anything SHE'D like to read as a kid. Frankly, some of the stuff in the story is NOT something I'd let my own kid read (if I had one). I mean Roland's flaccid penis is literally referred to on Page 4. But it IS the only Stephen King book that's really PG-13 at worse.

Shame on all of King's fans who gave the only worthwhile thing he wrote at this stage of his career misleading negative feedback, and God bless Stephen King for taking it personally. He might not have if the story weren't awesome and one of his best books. Because it's amazing, I'm as annoyed at his fans as he is. *****.

This is my second-least favorite of Stephen King's short story collections (I think only Night Shift is worse). King simply wasn't very good at short stories earlier in his career. Most the the really bad ones lack a basic logic to them and the downer endings tended to be random rather than scary. I love the non-horror story "The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet", and the return to the awesome Storytelling Club in "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands" is welcome, but other than that, the collection contains far more misses than hits.

Before reviewing the stories I should mention that at the notes at the end King says one of his famously snotty, elitist things when describing fans curious about where the stories came from. He says fans and snoops are the same thing. A younger King had a very obnoxious habit of making broad, untrue statements about ALL readers and writers he had no business speaking for. It never fails to piss me off.

Oh well. Collection Overall: 1 1/2 stars.

The Mist

I think the interesting thing about all of Stephen King's various apocalyptic thrillers is that he reaches different conclusions in all of them. In the question of whether civilization and society can band together and face the nightmare ahead of them with strength and resolve, or if the human race is doomed, King is neither a constant optimist or a doomsayer. His answer to that question always boils down to "It depends". You have heroes looking after the remains of society like those in The Stand, things will be all right eventually. Even having misguided people calling the shots doesn't always lead to disaster if they are reasonable (see Sleeping Beauties). And sometimes the public at large frowns on actual heroism in an apocalyptic Hellscape (Cell). And sometimes the heroes never have a chance because people more powerful than they are sabotage their efforts (Under The Dome). The Mist unfortunately is populated by the same kind of stubborn and useless characters that doomed the town of Chester's Mill in Under The Dome. Byron is both stupid and then malevolent, Norton so unhelpful and stubborn you think half of his death wish is deliberate, and Mrs. Carmody is the last person a bunch of scared people should be trapped with for days on end. The story ends on a measure of hope for David and his son. But unlike the "downer" ending to Christine, I'm not actually optimistic about David's chances here. And not just because the movie suggested they were far darker than the novella does.

King sort of disliked this story because of David's adultery, which is something I don't understand about his writing method at all. It's HIS damn story. If he feels something isn't working, he should freaking change it. The adultery doesn't make or break the story or the characters, so if King really had a problem with it, well, it's actually up to him to get rid of it during the rewrite. I agree with the notion that the best stories tell themselves through the characters and the Author is just their Conduit. But King acting like the story was a failure because of the adultery is King not taking responsibility for the power he DOES have. And if the characters speak falsely to him, King is perfectly entitled to overrule their initial conclusions until he gets it right. I repeat: I don't understand his writing method at all.

In the notes King is VERY fond of the opening line "This is what happened." It's not as cool or iconic as "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed," but that's because it's not as specific, and doesn't feel like only something King coulda come up with. It's a great first line. But it could open pretty much ANY novel and work equally well.

It's suggested in other supplementary material that the creatures from the Mist come from Todash Space (as seen in The Dark Tower) but really I think that's only something that can truly be put together in hindsight. It doesn't feel as if King was channeling the Tower when he was writing the story. Mrs. Todd's Shortcut has a greater claim to being Dark Tower-adjacent than The Mist does.

I'm glad this was a novella because if it was one of King's LONGER apocalyptic thrillers I wouldn't tolerate the "Alfred Hitchcock ending". Because the story is as short as it is, it intrigues me instead. It's good to see that King is starting to understand the rules and expectations from readers for short stories, medium-length novellas, and long novels here. Bonus points for David himself calling it an Alfred Hitchcock ending.

This isn't really my favorite King novella though, and Skeleton Crew is my second-least-favorite of his collections after Night Shift. But it's not terrible. 3 stars.

Here There Be Tygers

I believe this was the first Stephen King story I read from start to finish in its entirety.

My old school had an extra copy of Skeleton Crew lying around, and I picked that story to read because it was the shortest, and thus the least daunting-seeming.

I didn't like it at the time. It was confusing. The tiger is unexplained and the mischievous bent of the story doesn't feel scary, it feels super dumb. In fairness to King, this is literally one of the oldest stories he's ever consented to appear in one of his collections, but rereading it, I like my kid self for being confused and unimpressed with it. In the intervening decades my tastes have radically changed and matured. But I think I had this stupid story's number at the tender age of 13. 1 1/2 stars.

The Monkey

This story is very dull. What I mean by that is the prose is so uninteresting I have a hard time absorbing and retaining it.

The use of the n-word is one of the ugliest instances in Stephen King's entire career.

About the only thing I like about the story is that is doesn't have a downer ending (a rarity for King's short fiction at this stage of his career). The story is still a dud. 1 1/2 stars.

Cain Rose Up

One of the most repulsive and reprehensible stories of Stephen King's decades-long output. I am amazed it is still in print. It's that bad. 0 stars.

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut

This story is charming! King has a delightful ear for Maine dialect, and when the characters in the story are likable instead of insufferable, it's a lot of a fun. "If it ain't true, it ought to be!" One of my storytelling mantras and obviously one of King's too.

Is it possible the dead woodchuck on the car is a Throcken / Billy-bumbler as seen in The Dark Tower? It sounded a bit more savage and poisonous than Oy was, but there are definitely SOME similarities in the description for sure.

Great story that I think travels closer along the Path of the Beam than The Mist actually does. 4 stars.

The Jaunt

I imagine this was a spiffy sci-fi story when it was written in the early 1980's. With 40 years hindsight it seems sloppy as hell.

King's problem is he does something most other sci-fi writers know you should NEVER do: He tries (and fails) to predict the near-future (and he does it badly). His wrong guesses are so comically off-the-mark it's almost astounding. The heroic U.S. Presidents mentioned are Lincoln... and HART? Seriously, Stephen. Stop. You are terrible at this.

And as interesting a sci-fi history as it is, I find the dark ending mean-spirited and unnecessary. The story already had credibility problems. That ending right there wrecked its ENJOYABILITY, which was really the only thing it actually had going for it. 2 stars.

The Wedding Gig

I like this story because it's an early example of King branching out from horror to straight drama.

I don't much care for the Narrator, but King very much makes him feel like a man of his time. He hates the n-word and still says it in front of his black bandmate. And he believes he needs to comfort Maureen at the end, which is if you ask me, a stupid and unreasonable belief. Him thinking there are some magic words out there to make things better in front of a crying woman shows he is very much an old-fashioned, and yeah, ignorant man of his time, as complex as his feelings are.

I'm glad Billy got to play in a better band, but I especially like the specific type of revenge Maureen took on the Greek. We didn't even witness it, just briefly heard about it second-hand, but considering what he did to her and her brother, it bordered on justified. And it is tenth level horrible.

Pretty good. 3 1/2 stars.

Paranoid: A Chant

Stephen King writes a poem, and tries to channel an insane person in it. I have known my share of insane people, and King's mistake is that he believes they are verbose. Most of them aren't. Most of them wouldn't ever say this chant, even if it they believed the insane things the Author of the poem does.

So-so. 2 1/2 stars.

The Raft

Gruesome, horrible story. The characters are all unlikable. Maybe that's King's justification for the reader to not care about the terrible, gross things happening to them, but if you ask me, that's an actual failing. I don't thank any project that makes it so I don't care about a character's death.

The most interesting part of the story (and the most horrible to contemplate) is Randy realizing he and maybe even Laverne could have potentially gotten away while the spot was busy with Deke, but they didn't think of it and missed their chance. Not every bad thing that happens in a horror story is inevitable. A lot of it has to do with bad and dumb choices from the victims.

But this is quite possibly the goriest, more visually disgusting story King has ever done. I won't thank him for that either. 1 1/2 stars.

Word Processor Of The Gods

This is a Twilight Zone story, one of the wish-fulfillment bent, and with an uncharacteristically saccharine happy ending.

But in 2023 it plays a little bit differently. The notion of the guy making his brother's dead wife and son HIS wife and son through the magical word processor has a noticeable lack of consent attached to it. That means as high-concept of a wish-fulfillment story it seems, deep down it's a rape story. I might have actually dug this story 20 years ago, before that would have occurred to me. Now the story feels both uncomfortable and dated to me for it. 2 stars.

The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands

Oooh, return of the mysterious storytelling Club from Different Seasons' "The Breathing Method"! Excellent concept King uses for the second (and as of yet final) time. Seriously, Uncle Stevie, get back to this. You KNOW you want to make the Dark Tower stuff in the first story explicit!

Gregson's story of Henry Brower was not as great as McCarron's story of Sandra Stansfield in The Breathing Method, but it didn't really need to be. Despite the framing structure being set during modern times, The Club always has a very old-school feel to it, not just because the stories invariably take place decades earlier.

The speculations raised about Stephens and his "grandfather" crack me up, especially the bit at the end about the mole. Seriously, Uncle Stevie you are just going to leave this awesome premise on the table? I feel as bad about that as the Club members did when Browers takes off before collecting his poker winnings.

Interestingly, the actual story of the Club is told in first person from a Club member, but we don't know which one it was, just that it isn't David Adley this time (or Emlyn McCarron). The Stephen King Wiki erroneously states it's Gregson who Narrates the story, but in reality, the unknown Narrator just listens to Gregson's story and relates it to us. We don't actually learn who it is.

I love this story and The Club. I want more! Even decades later! 4 1/2 stars.

Beachworld

It's a neat future sci-fi story, with the only hint of when it takes place the suggestion that the Beach Boys have been dead for 8000 years.

The story also has a very warped sense of humor about it that I appreciated. It's pretty good. 3 stars.

The Reaper's Image

Like The Monkey, the prose here is so dull I find it hard to absorb or retain what I'm reading. I must have read this story at least five times in my life and I still have only the vaguest ideas of what it's about. 2 stars.

Nona

Extremely disturbing and horrific story that does something King was unable to do with either Rage or Strawberry Spring: It makes the first person murderer narrating the book somewhat sympathetic. Probably because I think he's FAR crazier than either Springheel Jack or Charlie Decker, so I actually feel a bit bad for him.

The rat motifs throughout the story make me shudder in all the right places. For the collection "Skeleton Crew", a phrase King returns to in three of the stories is "Do you love?" While I don't feel it's appropriate for The Raft, it feels as mysterious and ambiguous as it should here.

Kingverse connections of note: The unnamed Narrator had dealings with both Ace Merrill and Vern Tessio from The Body / Stand By Me. In hindsight many people have speculated that Betsy Malenfant might be the sister of Hearts-obsessed Ronnie Malenfant from the story Hearts In Atlantis from the collection of the same name.

I don't like very many of the horror stories in Skeleton Crew. Nona is a pleasant exception. It's freaky in the right ways. 4 stars.

For Owen

Sweet poem King wrote for his youngest son when he was little and going off to school. Pretty much the only one of his works' that I've read that could easily be rated G. 3 1/2 stars.

Survivor Type

I'm pretty sure the only person who likes this story is Stephen King himself.

It's just disgusting on every level and triggers your gag reflex like few other things. Plus the main character is such a jag I can't even sympathize with his suffering.

King wonders why he had a hard time selling this story to magazines? Because the magazines King sold his stories to knew it went against their best interest if their strokebooks were making their readers want to puke. It's just that simple.

Ugh. Revolting. 0 stars.

Uncle Otto's Truck

I found the story a bit underwhelming and even a bit difficult to understand in places.

Kingverse connections: Frank Dodd's father Billy is mentioned.

Meh. 1 1/2 stars.

Morning Deliveries (Milkman No. 1)

I'm sort of obsessed with both of the Milkman stories. There is probably a REALLY interesting backstory behind the Spike Milligan saga, but the Stephen King Wiki has few details. From what I have pieced together, the Milkman stories were a couple of scenes from a novel King abandoned (called The Milkman). And I can see why. The idea that Milligan goes around murdering people in cartoonish ways and the neighborhood seems to simply accept it is so loony a premise, I couldn't even buy it coming from Richard Bachman. But the two stories seem to be connected and both raise questions that a novel would undoubtedly given a fuller picture for.

The irony? Neither are exactly good stories. But I wish to hell I knew more about their history and what possessed King to write a novel that crazy. 2 1/2 stars.

Big Wheels: A Tale Of The Laundry Game (Milkman No. 2)

This story is quirky and random and nonsensical and weird. And again it REALLY interests me.

Leo's "hole in his back" is a silly concept, and something David Lynch would have one of his characters claim and obsess about on Twin Peaks, and the things the other characters say and do are also insane when they aren't totally sinister (which admittedly isn't TOO often).

The Milkman stuff is some of King's most out-there, ludicrous writing. 2 1/2 stars.

Gramma

I have never cared for this story. I don't think there is much more than needs to be said on the subject. 1 star.

The Ballad Of The Flexible Bullet

This story isn't just funny and strange it's also, well, COOL. It also ends the right way, which is unusual for most of King's short fiction in the 1980's. I get a kick out the idea of Fornits, the idea that madness can potentially be catching (a theme King later returned to in the short story "N"), and the Flexible Bullet metaphor itself.

Henry the Editor is a riveting storyteller, and is was fascinating to hear the ins-and-outs of the writing process from the point of view of an editor. King has a lot of writers in his stories. The problems the editor faces and talks about feel entirely new to me, and still King writes them credibly because he understands The Business.

The Fornits crack me up, especially the dude putting food in the typewriter to feed it. Henry saying he saw the hand that once shows that he DID really go crazy. I love that Henry is self-aware enough to make the distinction when talking about that is that he cannot say for sure that it happened, but that he BELIEVED it did. That specific thing gives the story credibility. Even if you don't believe him, you at least will believe he isn't simply putting you on. I thought that was cool.

I think it's the strongest story in the entire collection. 4 1/2 stars.

The Reach

There is admittedly something beautiful about the ending, but the story itself is a little dull and dreary. For a better short, wistful ghost story go to "Willa" from the collection Just After Sunset. It's notable for being the third story in the collection to ask the random and deep sounding question "Do you love?"

Not great. 2 stars.

As I was reading the last hundred pages of this 1100 page book, I asked myself "How negative should I go in this review?". I could probably spend three hours writing down every way Stephen King failed me and everyone else in his supposed Epic Masterwork. The quote blurbs seen at the beginning of the paperback ("A landmark in American literature", "King's most mature work") are only true if the reviewers who said them reviewed the book on Opposite Day.

How negative will I go? Pretty damn. I'm actually angry.

IT is not the worst novel or story Stephen King has ever written. But I consider it is his most massive notable failure. Out of all of the Stephen King books that are famous, it is by far the worst. And probably only remembered fondly because of the good TV miniseries adaptation and decent film adaptation. The book itself is crap.

I first read it when I was 15, and not only I did not write down a review for it on paper, it is essentially the first movie or project I saw as a kid that I could review spoken-word pretty much verbatim to everyone I complained about the book to. And this specific spoken word review is the first review I've done that feel sort of like a Matt Zimmer review.

Here is the gist of me describing reading the book to people who would listen when I was a teenager.

"The book is about 1100 pages long, and I was reading it with a fair amount of interest until I got to around the 1000th page and I realized something. "I HATE this book." Completely. It ticked me off. Under most circumstances I'd simply stop reading it. But I had already spent 2 weeks reading a thousand dang pages and that's not a time investment you simply drop. What happened next is getting through those last hundred pages was a total drag and a slog and it took me about a month to cross the finish line a few pages a day at a time, because I was so disinterested in the book by that point."

Everybody I've told that review to gets a kick out of it. But you'll still be puzzled. You'll be like, "How did you manage to reread it for Stephen King Book Club if it was that hard for you?" Simple: The reader I am today is not not the reader I was at 15. I've read both the The Silmarillion and The Star Trek Encyclopedia cover to cover since then. It wasn't true when I was 15, but now I can essentially read anything. So while, yes, I DO appreciate and understand why my younger self hated this book so much, actually rereading it wasn't TOO big of an ordeal (although we'll discuss passages later on in the review that were).

So that's the fuss. What is my major malfunction with this book? The ending is atrocious. It is the worst ending King ever delivered. It is terrible on every conceivable level. Ever unforced error King COULD make, he DID make. There are few projects whose endings are as badly written on every level as It, The Novel. The 2012 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comes to mind. But it's really the only other thing that does,

I talk a lot of crap about King's problematic writing as far as me reading it in 2023 goes. And I have said elsewhere when taking shots at King writing something he shouldn't have, "The less said about the child orgy in IT, the better." The reason I resent having to finally sit down and properly review the book is because I actually DO have to say more about that. I actually have to talk about it. It makes me angry and unhappy that I can't just say "The less said, the better" about it per usual. I actually have to discuss is for the first (and hopefully only) time.

I believe the King stories Rage, Dedication, and Cain Rose Up are worse stories than IT. And by far. And I yet I will argue the six page chapter "Love and Desire" in this book is the single worst thing King has ever written. The is no part of it that doesn't make me cringe. I moan in discomfort and pure embarrassment on behalf of King's stupidity every five seconds as I'm reading it. It is pure torture to get through. The biggest problem with the scene is IT'S A FREAKING CHILD ORGY. The second and third problems with the scene are what essentially ruined the book. King plays it as erotic, which is insane to me, and it also contains the worst writing of King's entire career. He's talking about Bev seeing the birds, and I'm thinking IT definitively proves that Stephen King needed to get his druggie ass off cocaine because it was starting to negatively affect his work. I'm glad he got clean for the sake of his family, but the truth is IT ending the way it did never should have happened for a sober fella.

Where was Tabitha? Tabitha King has an admirable amount of veto power over her often misguided husband, and the dumb things he invariably writes. Why didn't she put her foot down over this? And how the hell could she sit there and allow him to dedicate the book to his then school-age children? And why the hell didn't King's editor step in?

To be honest, although that is the worst part of the ending, it's not the only bad part. My opinion of the book would still be negative for the insane narrative choice to have all of the characters forget each other and everything that happened with them, and how much they meant to each other! This is an 1100 page book, Mr. King! If nobody remembers anything or learns anything, what's the damn point? Why spend 1100 pages on a journey that actually doesn't matter?

The IT theatrical movie poked fun of this a bit, not just by King having a cameo playing a fanboy complaining about a much maligned ending to Bill Denbrough's most famous book, but actually making it so the Losers remember each other and what they went through at the end after all at the end of the second movie.

So easy zero grade, right, Matt? It's not that simple. If it were, I never would have read a thousand pages of that book when I was 15 to begin with. Being completely honest, I'd estimate about the first 850 pages are not just decent, but good, bordering on REALLY good, and showing occasional flashes of brilliance. As such, King has a MUCH bigger responsibility to deliver a halfway decent ending than if the book were simply 1100 pages of suck the entire way through. And frankly, I would have accepted halfway decent gladly. You can't deliver the worst ending ever after 1100 pages! You just can't! That's why I'm mad! That's why I recognized my youthful frustration and anger rereading it.

And there ARE a lot of things I liked until the last part of the book. But before we talk about the many good things, I also want to point out there is absolutely no good narrative reason for Bill Dembrough's infidelity with Beverly, which is why both screen adaptations either cut it down to some kissing or omitted it entirely. It makes Bill and the book worse. The book started losing me here even before the child orgy.

Let's talk about the good things. I have read the short story The Body a couple of times over the past couple of years, but it's been awhile since I reread IT. What I am impressed to notice is that outside of Richie Tozier, none of the Losers demonstrate the systemic white male toxicity of Gordie LaChance's gang. Ben Hanscomb is refreshingly well-mannered and polite, in fact. I freaking HATE IT, The Book. It amuses me its kid cast is still better than The Body's.

I dig Mike Hanlon as an adult. The things he says in his confrontation with adult Henry Bowers say the guy isn't just cool, he's smart. His idea for the walking tours was also canny, although he gets demerits there for erroneously believing one or two of the Losers would simply blow town. And the Derry Interludes dealing with the town's history fascinate me far more in this read-through than they ever had before.

While we are talking about Henry Bowers and problematic King writing, it is incredibly ironic to me that King, a writer who has no business using the n-word, and seemingly only does so to seem cool and edgy, (for the most part) uses it correctly here, (or as correctly as a white writer can at any rate). I don't appreciate how loose Richie Tozier is with it, but King gives the word actual weight from Mike's perspective. It's ironic that this book uses that word probably more than the rest of Stephen King's entire output altogether, and it's the first I think King isn't trying to normalize it. Henry Bowers is a scumbag and would or wouldn't be with or without that word. But it's the fact that he repeatedly uses that word that demonstrates that most effectively. I don't approve of King using the word. But he (for the most part) attaches a negative judgment towards white people using that word, which is a step in the right direction. But seriously, Richie Tozier just pisses me off because I can't hand King the full compliment there while he exists.

One of the failings of the theatrical movie was they tried to include the character of Patrick Hockstetter. Let me give this book an unvarnished compliment: The chapter detailing the kid's backstory and death is a high point of the entire book. The character doesn't work in the movie because you can't give the full picture and details about this side character unless it's a damn prose story. And it's the full picture that makes the character so horrific and appalling to begin with. It's not a perfect demonstration of psychopath. For one thing, I believe King is using Patrick's latent homosexual tendencies to demonstrate a way there is something psychologically wrong with him. (In fact, considering the death of Adrian Mellon at the beginning, it's a bit disheartening how anti-LGBT much of the language the characters use is.) But Patrick's story otherwise amazed me as a kid because King made me understand sociopathy in a way I hadn't before. And his manner of death is freaking awesome and gruesome (and a total gross-out) and I'm a bad enough person to believe it feels justified too.

I also loved the scene where Eddie confronts his awful mother after she send his friends away after Henry Bowers breaks his arm and he is in the hospital. It's King going into a lot of interesting psychological places with Eddie's character, especially because we get the scene entire from Mrs. Kasbrack's perspective as it is being narrated. And we see how racist and unpleasant and horrible this woman is, and how much damage she's done to her son, and when Eddie uses reason to basically get her over the barrel and force her to do things his way, I love it.

For the record, Mr. Keene is sinister. Not just for the stuff that happened with The Bradley Gang, or how he was portrayed in the novel 11/22/63. But I love the part where Eddie is asking himself why he would lie about the aspirator, and pushes away the far scarier question "Why would he tell him the truth?" It's because he's a bastard, that's why.

My favorite part of the book is The Apocalyptic Rockfight. Remember me refusing to give the book a zero grade? Honestly, I think parts of that sequence contain the best writing King has done up to that point. Reading the Narrator describing how Victor Criss did the most damage to the Losers that day paradoxically because he was the least emotionally involved, I am riveted, and freaking In The Damn Moment. What a great way to put that. There is something about the fact that Criss doesn't want to be involved in a rockfight, but if he is, he's gonna be IN It that's awesome. The prose in that paragraph sparkles. It's really hard to believe it was written by the same idiot who wrote Love and Desire and the other various sappy ending chapters. When I said the book simply falls apart after 850 pages I'm not kidding. After that point King starts using a bunch of flowery, meaningless language, confusing "poetic" narration, and pointless run-on sentences. It's like that first four parts of the book are written by a really good storyteller and the last part is written by an inane cokehead. The difference is noticeable and startling. And I resent the hell out of it.

Kingverse Connections to Note: The Turtle is a concept returned to in the third Dark Tower book (The Wastelands) and beyond, and there is given the name Maturin. It's interesting IT is really the only story we actually see him. Frank Dodd's killing spree from The Dead Zone is mentioned, and even though The Tommyknockers hasn't come out yet, we hear about both the town of Haven's woods and Rebecca Paulson here first. Dick Hallorann from The Shining is a minor character in one of the Derry Interludes, and it's hinted he saves Mike's father's life by actually using the Shine. This next bit isn't canon by a longshot, but I think King wants the reader to believe the red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury the corpse of Belch Huggins picks up adult Henry Bowers in is actually Christine.

In summary, I think King can regret Rose Madder and The Tommyknockers all he wants. If you ask me his most shameful, disappointing book is IT. By far. *.

That was NOT perfect (to put it mildly) but I still think it feels like a turning point. Not just for The Dark Tower saga, but the way Stephen King approaches climaxes in general. It is fair to say The Eyes Of The Dragon had a very exciting and twisty climax as well. But that being said, the actual surprises of that story (of how Peter escapes the Needle using the dollhouse and the napkins) had already been revealed. As tense as the madman Flagg running up the tower with an axe screaming he's going to kill Peter while Peter is scaling down the side in his makeshift rope is, it's a pretty basic action sequence in and of itself.

I feel like the climax of this book is so damn great because it takes a lot of unexpected twists and turns, and for the most part, they are pleasurable. And funny even. I love the fact that Roland tells the gun store owner he's taking the wallet and the bullets so the cops won't charge him with a crime. And he actually pays for the bullets. And he holds up a pharmacy for $60 worth of penicillin which he then pays for with a $6500 gold Rolex watch. One of the cops later recognizes him as the Terminator years from now and has a fatal heart attack. And I love Roland tells the bad cops they have forgotten the faces of their father and deserve to be sent West, and compliments the good cops, and tells them he doesn't want to kill them and this will be over soon. I think The Gunslinger is one of King's most outright unpleasant books, so to turn the sequel into essentially a rollicking good time is completely unexpected. It's a VERY well-paced action sequence, and the kind of thing King did more of as his career went along.

I also feel that the villains at the beginning of the book are great. King really gets us inside the heads of Enrico Balazar and Jack Andolini, and watching their surety over what's going on with Eddie Dean melt into confusion and then fear is great. I thought Eddie's interrogation in customs was great too. I think more junkies apprehended at airports need to demand the entire TSA be tested if they are on horse too. I'm curious if the TSA in 2023 would back down as quickly as the ones in 1983 did here.

The bit with the stoned Henry Dean and the repeated Johnny Cash answer in the Trivial Pursuit game with the mobsters is pure gold. I'm rolling at "Walter Brennan".

Roland's reaction to the Pepsi is amazingly funny too. He loves it so much he suspects it is the drug Eddie covets. And I also take note he loves the tuna fish sandwich too.

It's funny after Roland loses the fingers on the right hand at the beginning the first thing he tells himself is "Well, I jerk off with the left." That's great.

The major problem with the book is the Detta Walker stuff. Every time I reread it it seems worse and worse. It's SO bad in 2023, I can't fathom how painful it will seem if I reread the book in 2030. God, Stephen King is such an ass about racial matters. And the joining of the two personalities into "Susanna Dean"? That's always been a major part of the saga, as is the idea that it's supposedly Eddie's love that got her there. But not only is the execution clunky and sloppy, I think the actual premise and idea behind it is. And the truth is I've always thought that. And the ending and resolution of that is rushed in my mind because dwelling on it would just show the reader exactly how nonsensical it all is, and how badly it holds together. King asks us to accept an awful lot of that idea on pure faith, and it's just something I refuse to do. It's just so hokey and dumb.

King Connections Of Note: Flagg from Eyes Of The Dragon is mentioned, and Roland remembers back to a time he confronted him with two men named Dennis and Thomas. There is an untold Dark Tower story here Stephen King needs to get to someday. I'd even settle for it being a short story like The Little Sisters Of Eluria. But I GOTTA know the deets here. Roland does not seems to recognize this Flagg as either Walter or Marten either, but King's always played that idea a bit fast and loose.

This book claims Roland and Walter used to be friends, but I haven't seen that remotely hinted at in any other point of the saga.

This is not going be get five stars, and I do maintain that this is still from a period of King's life where his writing was struggling due to substance abuse. But like IT, he gets a lot of it right, but since it's the climax he gets so right, I forgive the book's many missteps where, I buried IT for its. ****.

This is one of the rare great books King wrote in the mid-to-late 1980's. He still had problems with drinking and drugging, but he actually sort of explores them here and his real-life experiences enrich the story a bit. There is a lot of repetition done in a manner of dream and fugue states and it all works very well for once.

It's a shorter book than usual too at 338 pages for the paperback. Unfortunately, and this doesn't effect the quality exactly, but it DOES effect my enjoyment of it a bit: It's a HARD book. It's painful to read throughout much of it, and freaking dark and heavy. It's no fun read. "Misery" is one of King's best book titles ever because not only does it work on two different levels, but the second level it DOES work on is freaking apt. It's King's most accurate story title at any rate. Desperation WISHES it were this accurate a title.

The best thing about the book is my entire problem with it: Annie Wilkes. Indisputably one of King's greatest villains of all time. But unlike Flagg or Pennywise, Annie takes after Greg Stillson and Big Jim Rennie in being a character I can't stand. Every page she is in the story I'm unhappy. She is the worst, most disgusting sociopath King ever created. People say there is a realism attached to her madness, and yeah, that's why she sucks. I recognize several real-world toxic and crazy people from her rank hypocrisy and refusal to take responsibility for her own actions. Paul sees a level of deliberate, knowing evil at the end, which is another reason I hate her. If she simply didn't know any better that would be one thing. But on some level she knows what she is doing is wrong and she enjoys the suffering she puts her victims through.

Paul Sheldon is an interesting protagonist. I don't exactly like him (anyone who goes around drunk driving is automatically a person I think is sucky deep down) but I relate and sympathize with him as a writer. Weirdly, it's as a writer which is where he understands SOME of Annie's fury most. Her telling him the difference between fair endings and cheats are like she's secretly been reading my crib sheet for every bad TV show I review and slam for the exact damn thing. I also liked Paul realizing that people take fiction VERY seriously. I took the day off of school the day after Quantum Leap's bummer series finale aired I was so upset. Fiction that strikes a chord with a person has a way of doing that. We treat the characters as real and when bad things happen to them, we feel as big and real a sense of grief as if they were living friends. Because in a way, they are.

Part of the reason King wrote this book was in response to unfair fan backlash over The Eyes Of The Dragon. Sheldon ultimately winds up thinking "Fast Cars" probably wasn't so hot, but I sincerely hope King never got that actual impression about Eyes, which was terrific.

Paul struggles with sneaking out of the room to find the Novril and coming upon the photo album called "Memory Lane" is great prose. I love Paul's description of the four racehorses he was suffering from (and their amusing names), and that King describes him braying a donkey laugh at every horrible thing he reads in that photo album. That specific phrase really sells how desperate and pathetic the character must have become at this point.

The stuff with the rat and the "special" birthday candle is King going straight for the gross-out.

One of the most annoying things about Annie to me is that the second Paul starts sharing writing insights with her that most people would kill to hear, she loses interest. She repeatedly insists to Paul she isn't stupid. And despite how cleverly she winds up covering her tracks, I still don't agree. Her lack of interest over interesting things makes her quite dull-witted in my mind.

King Connections Of Note: I just found one, but it's a doozy. The Overlook Hotel is mentioned, as is the crazy caretaker to who burned it down.

My favorite thing in the book is that Paul found a way to screw Annie out of the ending of Misery's Return without destroying the actual manuscript itself. In fact, after he's rescued, the book is fast-tracked and published (hopefully with the dedication to Annie removed). He believes it's the best thing he's ever written, so I admire his cleverness in actually finding a way to save it. In the movie Paul actually burns the actual book, probably because him creating a dummy copy would be hard to explain onscreen, and would slow the climax down having to do so. But that's why I like the book. Prose lets us slow down and savor cool stuff like that, and it's also why most books tend to be better than their movie adaptations.

His agent at the end talking about the money he could make writing a book about his ordeal makes me think Paul shouldn't be begging it off, and taking him up on it instead. He claims earlier on that if he survived this, stuff like being forced to drink his own urine are things he'd never tell ANYONE, but I think the telling of those things would be even more riveting as a non-fiction book because it means it actually happened! Paul begs off writing the bio because he believes it means he has no more fiction left in him. I hope the story at the end convinces him otherwise. And even though I'm not crazy about Fast Cars either, I hope someday he can recreate it. Just to spite Annie's memory.

The book had a bunch of interesting and cool allegories in the repeating language it used. I'm not crazy about "So vivid!" and "Now I must Rinse" but the stuff about Goddesses and Africa sounds incredibly dreamlike, and I also like the metaphor for the tide going in and covering the pilings corresponding to the pain being eased by the Novril. I also really like the metaphor of Paul seeing writing as a hole that he falls through when he goes to work. Can he? Yes. Did he? Yes. Also great things to tie to the last scene.

This is one of King's best books from this period, but I'm holding off giving it a perfect five-star grade, simply because I actually find it too upsetting, even for a horror book. I hate Annie Wilkes with a passion, and probably a lot more than King intended me to. Because I believe a person this crappy could exist. Real-life shows they are a dime a dozen. But it's still one of King's best from this era. ****1/2.

I was prepared to give this a negative review, but it simply isn't as bad as I remembered it. It's really a huge mess, way too long, and with an unsatisfying ending, but I remembered it worse than it was. Maybe if I read it again I'll think differently. But it's mediocre, not bad.

The thing in the book that I have always absolutely hated, and why I looked back on it negatively was Jim Gardener's obsession with the nuclear power argument at the cocktail party. Given a few decades hindsight, it's easy to see how King was wrong about the danger it posed, and the reality that Earth and its climate and political catastrophes are far different and direr than predicted in the 1980's. That's not my problem. It's that the chapter goes on for damn near forever. My God, King has A Righteous Stand to take, and is beating the reader over the head with it until we are as sick of Gard as everyone else at the party is. King had some weird hang-ups and obsessions during this dark point in his career.

Nothing says King is spiraling out of control in his personal life more than the fact that he makes the drunk character, who never gets sober, the savior of the human race and somebody to be counted on when the chips are really down. Who are you really trying to convince of that, Uncle Stevie? Us or yourself?

But despite the fact that the book is too damn long, and certainly too damn long for us to tolerate him killing off every single main character but two kids, it has its charms. For sure. I always hated the Rebecca Paulson chapter, and this read-through didn't change my mind of that, but the stuff of Hilly Brown's obsession with magic hit me right this time out. It was King exploring an unattractive emotion and feeling, and doing it honestly. King is shockingly astute when he says Hilly is disappointed and mad at honest praise. He wanted people's eyes to be a big as dinner plates and to make the ladies in the magic show audience scream in terror. This is not a feeling I've really dealt with either as a kid or an adult. Most of the things I'm good at I've been relatively successful at, and honest praise felt earned and sincere. But King's writing is so great because he makes me understand why it isn't good enough for a failure like Hilly. Frankly, during his backstory, I find Hilly really quite tiresome and obnoxious, so to see that this specific failure is actually the thing that gets to him is interesting.

I loved most of the team-up between Ev Hillman and Monster Dugan. It ending the dark way is did is why the book largely manages to annoy me.

John Leandro's story is similarly compelling, but I felt his bad ending was more earned. He simply wasn't being careful enough.

Ruth McCausland's story, as the one fully infected Haven resident actually resisting the evil alien force, is both bitter and encouraging. Even if she fails, I like that not everybody is welcoming this "Becoming" with open arms. Even if literally everyone else is.

Moss Freeman's friendship with Gard is interesting, especially the deep regret and rage he feels upon Gard's "betrayal". He actually sort of liked the guy! Why did he have to go and be such a colossal F-Word Up?

I enjoyed Gardener's ride in the van with the friendly hippies. This is a selling point to Stephen King you don't find every writer indulging in. King often puts random strangers in the path of the troubled main character who are well-intentioned and helpful to the desperate hero, for the sole reason that random people like that actually exist, and good people popping in and out of a suffering person's life is not an actual rarity. And the hippies are not punished or killed off for their kindness either. King's writing at this stage of his career is shaky because of the drugs. But he still has an ear for people (good and bad) much better writers than he was at this point in his life simply don't. And King doesn't just show the bad and the horror. Even in a book with such a high death toll and hard ending, there are good things too. Just like a hard life. And finding and cherishing those good things are important. Not just in real life. I think they are in fiction too. I think people being accustomed to their heroes doing nothing but suffering in popular culture really aren't being given an accurate look at humanity, or the full picture of how those characters can react to different situations. We take it for granted the hero must be broken and miserable. Why? And if they are (and Gard certainly is) why aren't they ever usually allowed measures of compassion and grace? Because those things being entirely absent from a given hero's life is the thing that is actually unrealistic to me.

King Connections Of Note:

A lot. Arcadia Funworld and the Alhambra Inn and Gardens from The Talisman are where a hung-over Gardener wakes up after his bender. He even meets a kid there coincidentally named Jack. He's the wrong age for Jack Sawyer, in 1988 (and has the wrong backstory), but it's a cool callback anyways.

The reporter David Bright from The Dead Zone appears, and his backstory with Johnny Smith is touched upon.

While in Derry, Ev Hillman seems to hear a cackling in the sewers, and another character sees a clown with silver eyes. This either means the Losers were actually unsuccessful in killing Pennywise, Ben Hanscomb missed one of Pennywise's eggs and the kid is taking over the family business in short order, or this story takes place on a different level of The Dark Tower where the Losers never took on Pennywise at all. I would like to believe it's the third thing. But hints of a creature like Pennywise surviving pop up in other later books too, including Dreamcatcher and Gwendy's Final Task. I think it's pretty definite in my mind Bill Denbrough and Richie Tozier actually took out IT. It seems likely to me the new IT terrorizing Derry is probably one of ITs spawn.

People from the Shop show up and the events of Firestarter are mentioned.

Arnett, Texas from The Stand is mentioned.

The movie version of The Shining is referenced. I never understood the rules of how it is characters in King's books are able to see movies detailing things that should actually take place in this same Universe. I never got that bit.

I seem to recall the miniseries adaptation got negative reviews, and I believe King disliked it, but I always thought it was all right. King isn't actually crazy about the book himself, and it's easy to see why. Him saying there is a good story for about 500 pages of this book lost in a bloated mess is probably true too. It's not the story that sucks. It's the overlong presentation that ultimately makes the book unwieldy.

As King's first real hard sci-fi book it won't revolutionize the genre. The same can be said for the later sci-fi novel Dreamcatcher (which also suffers similar pacing problems). It's funny, but when King tackles fantasy like in The Dark Tower, Eyes Of The Dragon, and Fairy Tale, he tends to knock it out of the park. It's weird both of his major stabs at science fiction were such disappointments. And the fact that they were makes it easy to see why King always seems reluctant to return to the genre.

Don't hold me to this opinion in the future (I can notoriously change my mind about something in hindsight) but that was slightly better than I remembered it. **1/2.