The Giver (1993) – reviewed 4 times previously (3.75 avg) I love dystopian fiction. Give me a zombie apocalypse or oppressive regime, and I’m happy. Unless we’re talking about really having to live under those circumstances, in which case you can count me out. So The Giver should be right up my alley. Only….well, it’s written for 14 year olds. It’s not that this isn’t a good book, I’m just 20 years too old for it. This book is trimmed of any excess. There’s a […]
“Your pitiful souls mean nothing to me.” – Stephen King (probably)
I had nothing to go on before reading this apart from my cursory knowledge of the movie and that Stephen King wrote this novel in a drunken stupor which he barely remembers. Which is to say, I held little hope for a story about a rabid dog that traps a mother and son in their car. Despite the fact that this book seriously ruined the ability for anyone to call their dog Cujo, I don’t really consider it a horror novel. This is the story […]
A haunting reminder of what we can be: just boys grown tall.
Some spoilers below. My wife attempted this book a few months ago and it devastated her. For her, it was an unremitting wasteland of degraded women that, instead of highlighting the great strides towards equality that we’ve made, emblazoned the vast distance we’ve had to travel to become a society barely cognizant of the barriers still firmly in place. To read such a visceral recitation of subservience and lack of empowerment endangered her emotional equilibrium. So, despite near universal acclaim, I was somewhat reticent about […]
Mostly Stephen King, but a little bit of Adolph Hitler. Now with a Bernie Sanders reference!
The Running Man (1982) by Stephen King (3.5 stars) -not previously reviewed for the CBR Written as Richard Bachman, King’s introduction to this edition lays out his reasons for creating the pseudonym and, ultimately, killing him off following the discovery. Given his reasoning (which is basically that he wanted to try something different and test his success), I’m left wondering if King has other pseudonyms out there we don’t know about. I’ve wondered that about J.K. Rowling, as well. I’ve never really been interested in […]