“I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe. And one day while you were doing that, you felt something pushing back.” I can’t believe I only have one book left in this series! It feels like I’ve been reading it forever, but also no time at all. (I read The Gunslinger last fall, and The Drawing of Three in December, which is when I really fell into Sai King’s world.) What it really feels like being inside this story, I […]
“First comes smiles, then the lies. Last comes gunfire.”
It’s sort of hard to be objective when a book sucks you in as hard as this one sucked me in. It’s not often anymore that I actually lose myself in a book—just straight up forget about my own existence, and become completely absorbed in a fictional one—but this one totally did that. It gave me the same feeling as The Drawing of Three, which is probably still my favorite in the series so far, though this one comes close. Roland and his ka-tet are […]
“Nothing good happens in the middle of the night, right?”
Elizabeth receives a call late one night, and it’s the worst news she can imagine. Her son, Tommy, has vanished into the local woods without a trace after spending the day at his usual hangout, a large split boulder deep in the woods that the boys have been calling Devil’s Rock. The friends he was with seem to be hiding something and there are no other leads on where he might have gone. As the official investigation into his disappearance stalls, Elizabeth begins to see […]
“You can’t choose blindness when it suits you”
At 153 pages, one can get through The Ballad of Black Tom in an afternoon, but the issues that author Victor LaValle raises will stay with you long beyond that. This is a fantasy/horror novella set in 1924 New York City. The main characters are in touch with the mystical realm, but their interests in it will lead to horrors beyond imagination. There will be monsters, and some are of their own making. Though set in the ‘20s, LaValle’s story is a brilliant commentary on […]