When I was in the seventh grade, I went to summer camp and discovered books I had never heard of or seen before. Other girls brought books like Flowers in the Attic and Forever, stolen from their older sisters. We all borrowed them and couldn’t get enough of these adult-seeming books. And then one girl showed us The Shining. I had no idea what it was, but she told me it was scary. And Constant Reader, it was scary. But not scary enough. I devoured The Shining, […]
Doctor Sleep and the Lure of the Sequel
While I was reading Doctor Sleep I was bouncing back and forth between my memories of the novel, written by Stephen King in 1977, and the movie adaptation by director Stanley Kubrick, from 1980. I suspect King may have had both in his mind as well. Although it is well-documented that King didn’t love the film version, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance was indelible, as were Shelley Duvall as his wife Wendy and the Overlook Hotel itself. The sins of the father will play out in his […]
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 […]
Plumbing the Future and the Past for Thrills
I read these two books in close succession to one another. James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge – Zoo Zoo cover art Patterson and friends’ book are always a quick, fast, beach read, and Zoo was pretty entertaining in parts. Taking what humans have done to the world – pollution, deforestation, cell phone towers, etc. – and taking to the nth degree how all of that technology might affect the world’s animal populations is a clever concept. But … the overall book was a bit clunky. I felt like the some […]
A good, if a bit predictable, series ender.
All in all, this was a good series. This book, like the first two, was compulsively readable (although the second one is by far my favorite of the three). But taken as a whole series, they definitely work together to reinforce each other. The ending of this one had threads that reach all the way back to the first chapter of Mr. Mercedes. End of Watch brings us back to Brady Hartsfield, who has been hospitalized as a “gork” for going on six years now, […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
- …
- 62
- Next Page »