I’ve been impressed with the writing of H.G. Wells thus far. War of the Worlds was as good as I’d hoped: as exciting as the Spielberg movie, but without the insufferable children and tedious family dynamics. The Time Machine, while a tad dry, was still well-written and enjoyable. The Island of Dr. Moreau was fairly straight forward, but was masterfully executed, prescient, and surprisingly humane relative to other books of its era (think Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, or some of Rudyard Kipling’s work). The Invisible Man completes […]
When the night has come
This, perhaps the most quintessential “Stephen King story” ever written, walks that delicate, liminal space between childhood and adolescence. Here lies the age when perfection exists unrecognized. When you have the friends you’ll always carry with you, regardless of later circumstance. This is the age when childhood has reached its apogee: immediately before the confusion of puberty and the discovery of girls. It is a time for unchecked vulgarity, false bravado and posturing, and the constant interplay and co-mingling of imagination and experience, where the […]
My, what big teeth you have.
The inimitable H.G. Wells, from 1895-98, wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. That’s an unbelievable concentration of brilliance that I can’t find in another writer. Someone like Stephen King has written numerous works that will (or have already) become classics of their genre, but they’re spread out over a career (for instance, 1978’s The Stand followed hot on the heels of 1977’s The Shining, but Misery came out in 1987 and The Green Mile […]
Its essence is a mathematical construct, a self-referencing tautology, consecrated in the plane of regret.
A salute to the Cannonball Read and the Readers, for bringing this book into my brain. Holy crap, you guys. So good. Honestly, I had been expecting (and bracing myself for) something super duper effed up, based on the reviews that I had skimmed (to avoid spoilers). And yeah, it’s dark and horrifying and confusing and complex, but still really fricking readable. Here’s what I texted about 20 of my closest friends when I was halfway through and couldn’t stop reading last night: “It’s as […]