An amazing but ultimately explicable act of legerdemain?

Texas Dracula.

But also a murder mystery and police procedural.

So the new Stephen King is pretty much the old Stephen King in terms of subject-matter, the plot and narrative, and even a recurring character (whose cameo I was not so sure about…but it turned out ok). And the result of familiarity mixed with 2018’s general sense of things (there’s an AIR of Trump in this novel, but not that much)…and the significant change of setting makes this is a solid book in general.

It’s still localized in the plot and scope, so it’s more akin to the Bill Hodges than The Stand or IT, but the writing is generally still very solid. There’s a concern within it for the nature of facts and evidence and how an evil creature willing to exploit gaps in the system can do so and how those that believe in the system so much can commit evil when their beliefs and conviction outpace and outweigh their sense of right and wrong.

And there’s a rehashing of the basic Dracula plot…something that would have worked better if Salems Lot was not already a complete rehashing of Dracula.  And yet, I thought it worked ok. I have tried to read a few other horror writers and I just really don’t care and can’t get into them. Stephen King got his hooks into me very early in my life and it’s been this way ever since. He still has this bad habit of making weird little allusions to books and authors that I know people read, but probably wouldn’t engender as much enthusiasm as the characters in his novels do.

(Photo: http://www.comingsoon.net/horror/features/853431-creeping-death-on-stephen-king-movies)