I’m a huge horror fan, but am very picky about horror books. There are lots of great horror movies out there, but I always think there are far fewer great horror novels. Horror seems to work better as a short story or novella when written, for some reason, perhaps just because it’s hard to build and maintain tension for the entirety of a novel. But King? He tends to know what he’s doing when it comes to writing horror, even if he is often bad […]
It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating
Insomnia – 2/5 This is one of the most 1990s books I’ve ever read, and that is sometimes ok, and almost never a boon. It’s also likely one of Stephen King’s most 1990 book, and that’s not a good thing really, and in fact this book is pretty bad. Often, as it happens in king books, the supernatural element is less good than the fictional parts of the book. Not only is that the case with this book, the supernatural element becomes so distracting, so […]
Turns out King IS capable of writing something I don’t enjoy
The Regulators was something of a rarity for me. Dreamcatcher aside, I’ve not often read a Stephen King book that I didn’t really enjoy. As I’ve been mostly reading in chronological order, I’m well aware that his best is now probably behind me, but I do hope that the rest to come is still better than this. Written under the name of his alter ego, Richard Bachman, The Regulators is a companion piece to Desperation, a decent read in which an entity named Tak was […]
“When the mind’s filter disappeared, the big picture disappeared with it. There was no forest, only trees. At its worst, there were no trees, either. Just bark.”
The reviews on Uncle Stevie’s latest tome have been mostly similar: a great, suspenseful first half, telling a story about a police investigation into the brutal murder of a child by a seemingly innocent man…and a less successful second half, filled with supernatural elements and a character from earlier novels. Most reviews have pointed out that the story presented in the first half were quite enough for a full novel: local good citizen arrested for horrific crime, town turns against him and his family, regardless […]