- LISEY'S STORY - A girl whom I care for told me this book was a dud, but I liked the look of it and bought it anyway. I suppose it's conceivably possible that I mayhap should have considered listening to her advice... King loves this effort more than any of his others but I can't for the life of me find any interest in it. I guess I'll finish it someday... after all, when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
- THE SHINING - Followed closely by his finest hour. Kubrick's film was a masterpiece, and King's novel is an entirely different masterpiece. There's a certain, untapped variety of horror that comes from detailing the slow journey a person has to take to becoming a monster, and The Shining is the most exquisite example I've come across. A classic tale and genuinely creepy, it also surprised me by using its supernaturalism to drop poetic hints about paternity and alcoholism, as well as paint an exquisite portrait of self denial. Can't always be said of King, but this is one for the ages.
- THE STAND - Longest bastard I ever read, and not quite worth it. As usual, great characters and an entertaining playing ground, but I have to say his televisual adaptation of this monster of a book had the good sense to keep its tongue in its cheek, and I think that's where it triumphed, while the novel ended up floundering in its own seriousness. I did enjoy, however, the throw away (and gleeful) reference to Jim Morrison as an agent of darkness and evil.
- THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON - I think the second King book I read, and one short and sweet enough to sidestep his usual pitfalls. I think this was also one of the first books he wrote after "the accident" and so, for my money, proof pudding that he didn't lose his touch in the process. As with all the best supernatural evils, the one at work on this little girl who gets lost in the woods is vague and possibly imaginary, largely combined with the victim's own subconscious. This is one of the best examples of King's unadulterated connection with those driven mad by horrific circumstance. He does it better than most any other, and he did it five fold here.
- BAG OF BONES - I found this book to be a loser. I much prefer when the ghosts are mysteries - to discover their secrets so thoroughly deadens it a little for me, and reminds me too directly I'm reading trashy horror. The description of grief (big shot writer loses his wife) is good, and suspense is there in stops and starts, but I could very well have lived without this one, I'm afraid.
- NEEDFUL THINGS - Not dissimilar to The Stand, Needful Things is an ensemble piece with a demon for a villain that goes on far too long. I did enjoy it, however, until the last fifty pages or so (to be fair, even The Shining fell short in its closing... the only King book I've read not to do so is Pet Sematary). Set in the author's favourite town in the world (poor Castle Rock, Maine), the characters would feature, as so many of King's do, in quite a few subsequent efforts, including Gerald's Game and Bag of Bones. Also, those who remember Keifer Sutherland's classic bully character from the King-inspired Stand by Me (1986) will be delighted to see he plays a huge part in the latter half of Needful Things, even though he was omitted from the movie version entirely. Couldn't afford to bring Keifer in, I expect.
- IT - Haven't read it yet.
- GERALD'S GAME - Almost a really solid effort, I think I would've loved Gerald's Game if it were a novella. Instead, I find it to be a great idea that was stretched to a format it couldn't quite support and ran out of steam. Nonetheless, I salute King for successfully combining a decent horror situation and a novel-length meditation of gender issues, social sexual discrimination and blatant misogyny. He's a guy, so he was probably wrong about it all, but from my limited standpoint I think he made some valid observations. Often, women get done treated no good. All the same, nothing would have been lost to shorten it a bit, I think.
- MISERY - My first. Probably the most spectuarly horrific novel this side of Rosemary's Baby... and it did it all without a shred of anything supernatural. Aside from the personal discrepancies I have with Lisey's Story, I'm with King a hundred per cent on Misery - he describes its writing as catching "a really big wave", and I felt the same way reading it. Blunt and mercifully short, Misery is the mother of all tongue-in-cheek personal allegories, the intimate tale of a popular writer literally held captive by the embodiment of fanaticism, but it also is one of the highest forms of trash literature. This is one of the few novels that's going to make you forget how ridiculous it fundamentally is. And I think we can all appreciate the irony of King's real life car accident much later in life - serves him right for being so damned autobiographical all the time.
- CUJO - Some novels, some by the very author of discussion in fact, are like emotional punches to the face. Cujo is an all out emotional beating: it punches you in the face with brass knuckles, kicks you in the shins and winds you, drops you to the ground and then kicks you in the ribs. Then it cuts off your cock. That aside, it is a pretty masterful example of how well Mr. King understands his genre of choice, how deeply he understands it and how he can manipulate its dark appeal into grand statements on humanity no matter how lame the material. Intellectually, we can't get past the fact that Cujo is a story about a Giant Rabid Dog. Emotionally however (and this is where we take the beating) what we can't get past is that is a story about the cruelty of fate and the indifference of the universe - how the simple crumbling of the figurative cookie can sometimes seem like a cosmic symphony of things going wrong for you, and how with a little ominous narration it can all seem preordained. No one wants to think that bad luck could ruin their lives so abrasively and completely, and King shows us here in painful and realistic detail exactly how that could happen. Though it's hard to imagine wanting to write a novel about an evil dog, its also hard to imagine such a novel being done any better than this.
- NIGHTMARES AND DREAMSCAPES - The afterthought to King's small canon of short-story compilations. Of the handful I've read, Nightmares and Dreamscapes doesn't have the fierce bite of Nightshift or Skeleton Crew, but the stories are nonetheless good. So far, Suffer the Little Children is the pick of the litter - a beautiful dozen pages of straight out creepy kid brilliance. I'm also looking forward to his completely non-fiction, non-horror essay on little league baseball. He does love baseball so.
Hope all are gearing up for a doozy of a new years. Gotta go practice for Flowers' end of year gig now.
If you enjoy the semi-trashy macabre work of Stephen King, both he and I recommend Richard Laymon and Clive Barker.
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