21-year-old college student Devin Jones gets a summer job at old-fashioned carnival and amusement park Joyland, trying to mend his broken heart, after his girlfriend left him for another. Working at Joyland, he’s taught the ways of the experienced carnies, discovers his knack for entertaining children while “wearing the fur” of park mascot Howie the Hound, lays the foundation of some life-long friendships and discovers the legend of the genuinely haunted House of Horror, where a young woman in a blue dress and an alice […]
“A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.”
“The road and the tale have both been long, would you not say so? The trip has been long and the cost has been high… but no great thing was ever attained easily. A long tale, like a tall Tower, must be built a stone at a time.” And so I’ve finished my second visit with the Dark Tower series. I read the whole series for the first time in 2006, I think. The seventh book had just been released and my best friend insisted […]
A Spiritual Sequel to Misery
Stephen King may love his Constant Readers, but he has a major hate-on for collectors, and people who fetishize authors and/or their work. Besides the popular example of Annie Wilkes, who kidnaps and torments her favorite author in Misery, we can also look to Calvin Tower, whose desire to collect and hoard books almost ends the world in the Dark Tower series. To these maniacs, King adds the nasty wolf, Morris Bellamy. “For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable […]
Oh Susannah Mio
Ah, Song of Susannah — probably the weakest link in the Dark Tower series, but still vital to the overall story line, since basically sets up the entire ending. But still. It’s not the greatest. “You doom yourselves, Susannah. You seem positively bent on it, and the root is always the same: your faith fails you, and you replace it with rational thought. But there is no love in thought, nothing that lasts in deduction, only death in rationalism.” At the end of Wolves of the Calla, Susannah […]
Constant Reader liked this one. Mostly. Until that stuff at the end.
As you are well aware by now, Uncle Stevie and I have a long, ongoing, somewhat unhealthy relationship. He writes, I read. No matter the length or the quality (hello, cocaine years), I was — and still am — there for him. I’ve read pretty much everything, and lots of times I’ve read stuff more than once. His short story collections? Automatic re-reads. Anything to do with The Dark Tower? I’m all over it. I’ll read it until I get every single cross-reference. And now, […]
Skip the novella but read the short story
Another Stephen King novella audiobook from the library. This one actually included two stories — the novella, Mile 81, and the short story, The Dune. I’m averaging their scores here: Mile 81 was not so great, but I really liked The Dune. So 3 stars overall. Mile 81 starts a little shit named Pete who breaks into an abandoned rest stop to impress an older group of boys. He drinks too much vodka, then passes out. When he wakes up, he discovers a bunch of abandoned vehicles at […]
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