Five More Kings

The re-reading Stephen King project marches on! 

Insomnia (1993)

This is one of King’s mammoth tomes and seems like it wants to be in the vein of It, but never quite makes it there. Great premise, though: after the death of his wife, 60-something Ralph Roberts has an increasing problem with insomnia, until he starts having hallucinations. He can see people’s “auras” but even worse, he has run-ins with three scissor-wielding “little bald doctors” that have the power of life and, more commonly, death. Turns out they are the supernatural beings responsible for deciding who lives and who dies—and Ralph dubs them Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, after their counterparts in Greek mythology. Atropos is a renegade who is severing people’s life cords willy-nilly—and the other two recruit Ralph to stop him from killing one individual in particular. It starts off well enough but the climax proves unsatisfying—there is another evil being called “The Crimson King” (King was listening to King Crimson, mehtinks) but has only a brief appearance toward the end, and then just kind of vanishes. Also, unless you are familiar with The Dark Tower, which I was not when I first read this back in the 1990s, you miss the point of why the person that needs saving needs saving. Anyway, the book has lots of nice details and characterizations, but doesn’t rank up there wth my favorites. Still, it’s better than The Tommyknockers. Curiously, it was impossible to find a printed edition of this one, even used. I had to read the e-book version which was not unpleasant, although I still remain unenthused about reading e-books. 

Grade: C+

Rose Madder (1995)

The last, for a while, I think, of King’s “women’s novels” tells the sory of abused wife Rose Daniels, who one day officially can’t take her abusive husband anymore, and runs away to a city that is never identified, but appears to be Chicago. She takes refuge at a women’s shelter—decades as a housewife have left her with no marketable job skills—and after an early job as a hotel chambermaid, she lucks into (in one of those Lana-Turner-at-the-drugstore-counter moments) a gig as an audiobook reader. Meanwhile, pawning her wedding ring, she finds an old painting called “Rose Madder” and knows she has to have it. And, of course, the clerk at the pawnshop turns out to be Mr. Right and she learns what it’s like to be in a non-violent relationship. Then, abusive husband Norman—a cop, natch—manages to track her down. Meanwhile, she discovers that the painting she bought has a strange quality: she can travel inside it.... Yeah, there is a lot that seems contrived about Rose Madder, and husband Norman is up there with Annie Wilkes of Misery  as one of King’s scariest non-supernatural monsters. (One of the things that Rose is beaten up for is reading “trash” like “Misery” novels—Paul Sheldon is still cranking them out in the King universe.) It is a unique take on the “abused woman gets revenge” story he has been telling for a few books now, but I think what makes it somewhat unsatisfying is the superatural climax. It would have been better to have Rose get her own revenge...or maybe she did, in a symbolic way). Not awful, but doesn’t rank up there wth my favories. Still, it’s better than The Tommyknockers.

Grade: B-

The Green Mile (1996)

Back in 1996, The Green Mile was a unique publishing experiment: it was a six-part serial novel, with one volume released every month. Set during the Depression in a southern prison, it is narrated by Paul Edgecombe, “head screw” on death row, aka “the Green Mile,” named for the green linoleum on which the dead man walks to “Old Sparky,” the electric chair. The novel(s) concern a weird series of events including a trained mouse, some violent death row inmates, some equally violent prison guards, and a wrongfully convicted inmate who has the magic powers of healing. I picked up each volume back in the day and really liked it at the time—and really liked it a lot better this around, as I think it’s probably his best novel since Needful Things. It’s a lot more streamlined than any book he’s written in a while (including Needful Things) and was easily finished in a weekend. But what I think made it work better this time around was that as strong as the story is, it had a bit less gravitas than a monthly serial would have warranted—I remember being disappointed by the payoff back in 96, less so now. As a quick weekend read, though, it was perfect. There are a few plot holes here and there (to explain them would be severe spoilage) but ultimately it turns out to be a beautiful meditation on life and love, with a very moving ending that reminded me of the end of 11/22/63. I never saw the movie, but the book(s) (it’s now available as a single edition) are a welcome return to form.

Grade: A-

Desperation (1996)

Desperation is a return to mammoth tomes (two of them, actually!) and a familiar King universe, the group of diverse strangers thrown together to battle a supernatural horror. It’s set up reminded me of a cross between The Langoliers and The Stand and while it may not be as good as either of those stories, it does have much to recommend it. It has a great opening: a couple from New York is driving through Nevada which—if you’ve ever been there, you know—is a whiole lotta nothing. They are stopped seemingly at random by an immense cop who demonstrates some bizarre mannerisms before turning completely psychotic. Turns out there is a reason: an ancient force of evil named Tak that was unleashed when an old silver mine was re-opened. If there is such a thing as an achetypal Stephen King story, this would be it. The character archetypes are there—the kid with weird powers, the self-obsessed writer whio has a change of heart, etc. It’s the goriest book he’s done in a while, and I think it will be the last of its kind for a few years. It’s a little over the top, but you never really expect restraint with Stephen King. All the God-bothering gets a little annoying after a while and I think undermines the ending. And I still have no idea what Tak’s ultimate goal was. What was it trying to accomplish? Mere survival? All in all, not among his worst...or is best. Still, it was better than The Tommyknockers.

Grade: B-

The Regulators (1996)

The Regulators, published under the Richard Bachman name, came out on the same day as Desperation, and features the same cast of characters—albeit in different roles—and the same evil entity. This time, it is set in a small suburban Ohio neighborhood where, suddenly, mysterious vans start gunning people down rather gruesomely. Then, the town behinds hnaging into the Nevada desert, with buzards and cacti—but loking as if a child drew them. And that’s because ewverything is a physical manfestation of the imagination of an eight-hear-old autistic boy who has been invaded by Tak. The boy, Seth, had a love of westerns, like Bonanza, and a fictional Rory Calhoun oater called The Regulators. Oh, and a modern hyper-violent cartoon called MotoKops, which is where the death vans came from. It’s basically a look of what happens if TV and movies became real... As one would expect, it’s not pretty. It’s a lot more grim than Desperation (if that ere even possible) and the carnage really does get t you after a while. The use of the Bachman name was not only to blunt the appearance od two big Steohen King books published at the same time, but also becauise The regualtors is a bit more in line with the nihilistic , hyper-violent ethos of the Bachman oevure, although there is a biut more sentiument here—perhaps we could call this later-period Bachman, if that makes any sense. In The Regulators, you get a better sense of what Tak was up to, although you never got the sense that it had any kind of end game in mind. Anyway, a worthy companion to Desperation.

Grade: B-

Up next, another Dark Tower and the more “literary” Bag of Bones. But first, his new book Mr. Mercedes just came out, so perhaps I need a diversion before delving back into the past. 

Three More Kings

The rereading Stephen King project continues! (And I appear to be making better headway than the guy who gave me the idea for this, who stalled back in November with Four Past Midnight.) I have also been alternating with other things, as reading only Stephen King will probably eat my brain. Charles Palliser’s Rustication was very good (I read his Dickensian debut The Quincunx back in 1990 but lost track of him over the years). The J.J. Abrams/Doug Dorst specialty printing extravaganza S. was also very good, and I got some mileage out of it for other blogs I contribute to. The new Thomas Pynchon novel Bleeding Edge (a satire of the post-dot-com boom) was excellent and very funny, and I finally made it all the way through Gravity’s Rainbow, as well as rereading V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Vineland. (Reading along with the Pynchon wikis is actually quite helpful.)

Anyway, back to Stephen King:

Gerald’s Game (1992)

This one routinely scores pretty low on King fans’ rankings of his books, but it’s not as bad as you would think. The premise is pretty notorious: Jessie, a middle-aged, wife accedes to her husband Gerald’s requests for an afternoon of bondage, and she is handcuffed mostly naked to the bed—and after a kick in the chest, Gerlad dies of a heart attack. They are of course in a remote cabin on a Maine lake, and it is early autumn, so there is no one around to hear her screams. How will Jessie get out of her situation? There are some pretty harrowing (i.e., gross) scenes, one involving a starving stray dog and a large all-you-can-eat buffet lying on the floor (’nuff said). There is also another character who plays a pivotal role—although as the book’s “Mr. Evil” he is a bit over the top, even by Stephen King’s standards. (One gets the sense that King read about Jeffrey Dahmer—who would have been in the news just before he was writing this—and thought “Heck, I can do better than that.”) Most of the book, though, is a stylistic experimentation with internal monologue, as Jessie flashes back to an unpleasant incident with her father during a solar eclipse in 1963. Maybe the pop psychology is a bit cheesy, but it largely works. The ending isn’t entirely satisfying—a common gripe in King novels, especially starting around this period. There is a tenuous connection to the next book, Dolores Claiborne, involving the same eclipse.

Grade: C+

Dolores Claiborne (1992) 

I recall reading Dolores Claiborne back in the 90s and liking it (I can’t remember if I saw the movie starring Kathy Bates), and while I didn’t dislike it this time around, getting through it was more of a chore than I recall. Part of the problem is that it is a single, long, unbroken narrative as the titular Dolores tells the police about the events that led up to her killing her husband many years earlier, and not killing the elderly dowager she had been working for. And it’s all in her rural Maine dialect, which gets irritating after a very short while. There’s nothing supernatural about the book, which isn’t a bad thing, and it makes a good revenge tale. Dolores is also a pretty sharply drawn character. As indicated above, it’s sort of a companion to Gerald’s Game, as both books flash back to events that happened during the solar eclipse of 1963. It’s another stylistic experiment, which you have to give him credit for. Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne mark the beginning of King’s “women’s novels,” which would include Rose Madder, which is coming up shortly. 

Grade: C+ 

Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993) 

King’s third short story collection, after Night Shift and Skeleton Crew, and like those earlier collections, it’s a mix of the compelling, the silly, and random experiments, some of which work and some of which don’t. Among the better stories are “Dolan’s Cadillac” (a little on the unbelievable side but it kind of works), “The Night Flier” (a vampire with a pilot’s license?), “Chattery Teeth” (supernaturally possessed joke teeth? a bit silly, but I liked it), “The Moving Finger” (a giant finger pokes out of a bathroom sink for no apparent reason), “The House on Maple Street” (an abusive stepfather gets a bizarre comeuppance), “The Ten O’Clock People” (only people who moderately smoke are able to see horrible creatures around them—another silly premise that kind of works), and “Sorry Right Number,” a screenplay for an episode of Tales from the Dark Side. There is an attempt at a Sherlock Holmes story (“The Doctor’s Case”) which is not bad, and a meta Twilight Zone-y Raymond Chandler piece (“Umney’s Last Case”) in which a character meets his author, which takes a bizarre twist. He channels Shirley Jackson in “Rainy Season” (a torrential rain of killer frogs is a small town ritual). Some of the sillier stories include “Sneakers,” “You Know They’ve Got  Hell of a Band” (all the dead rock stars are still alive in a secluded Oregon village—and they’re evil zombies), and a few others. He also should not try to write British characters (“Crouch End”). A hit or miss, but largely hit, collection, as usual.

Grade: B-

Interestingly, Insomnia, which is up next, is out of print, and even an attempt at getting a used copy has thus far been fruitless. I had to get the e-book version which, curiously enough, is more expensive than the paperback versions I had been picking up.

Hubcaps?

I just got a very strange wrong number…"I'm looking for some hubcaps." Really? I know little about cars, but when was the last time cars used hubcaps? Back when I was a kid in the 1970s, "stealing hubcaps" was the archetypal activity of juvenile delinquents, even though I had no idea why anyone would actually want to steal them. Was there a lucrative black market for hubcaps back then? Today, though, perhaps there could be. Or maybe that would be an antique store. 

Also, too: all those UFO photographs you used to come across every now and then seemed to have stopped about the time the auto industry phased out hubcaps. Coincidence? Read the book!

A Kings' Ransom

Yeah, it has been a while. Things to do, people to see, places to go.

But it has given me ample time to continue through the Stephen King bibliography, and an email from Steven H. (not Stephen K.) reminded me that I have not updated this in a while. So, here is where I have been...

The Tommyknockers (1987)

From the slim Misery we return to the epics, with what is essentially a cheesy 1950s scifi flick turned into a 1980s novel. (I had never read this one before, although I had seen the TV miniseries starring Jimmie Smits.) It’s the second example of what would become a King specialty: the population of a small town either turning against each other or conforming in some way and seeking to destroy those who rebel against the status quo. In Salem’s Lot, it was everyone becoming a vampire; here, it’s everyone turning into an alien after Bobbi Anderson digs up a long-buried spaceship on her property. The book is not awful, but I think what works against it is that the “hero”—Jim Gardener, an obnoxious alcoholic writer—is just generally unlikable. (Early on, it seems like the book is going to be about Anderson, but it is not, although we invest a good chunk of the early part of the book in her.) And then, a long 400-page stretch of the book barely even mentions either Bobbi or Gardener as King details the lives of many of the other people in the town and how they are affected by the spaceship.

He is also at his most self-referential in this one. In Misery, set in Colorado, there is a reference to the incident at the Overlook Hotel some years earlier (The Shining, of course). Here, he has Gardener turn up at the Arcadia Hotel and amusement park in New Hampshire (from The Talisman); some characters travel to the nearby town of Derry, Maine, and at several points one hears “chuckling noises in the drains” (from It, set in Derry); one of the characters is a reporter from Bangor who was also in The Dead Zone, and there are several references to the events of that book; elsewhere, he refers to the Jack Nicholson “Here’s Johnny!” scene in the film version of The Shining; at the end of The Tommyknockers, characters are taken to the CIA-like Shop from Firestarter, and references are made to the events in that book. Then we have, on page 386, where one character talks about Bobbi, “she wrote good old-fashioned western stories...not full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the ones that fellow who lived up in Bangor wrote.” 

Grade: C

The Dark Half (1989)

Thad Beaumont is a writer of literary fiction that, alas, has failed to sell. However, under the pen name George Stark, he wrote violent action-adventure stories that were best sellers. After being outed as the author of the Stark novels, he decides to leave those books behind and “kills” his pseudonym via a staged graveyard photo shoot for People magazine. However, George Stark comes to life, digs himself out of his makeshift grave, and starts killing everyone complicit in exposing Stark as Beaumont’s pseudonym, finally forcing Beaumont to write one more Stark thriller. It’s not hard to see where the idea came from (this was not long after King was outed as Richard Bachman), even if it is a supernatural variation on Misery. This wasn’t a bad one, even granting the premise which is very Twilight Zone-y (maybe not for nothing Beaumont was named after Charles Beaumont, one of the TZ’s top three screenwriters). I’m not sure I get what the sparrows were all about, but they were quite the deus ex machina.

Grade: B+ 

Four Past Midnight (1989)

Much like Different Seasons, this is a collection of four novellas, the most prominent of which is “The Langoliers,” made into a pretty good TV movie in 1994 or so. (Seeing it again not long ago, the cheesy digital effects have not aged well, but it’s still a damn good story.) The novella provides a bit more back story for the characters, and one even comes to sympathize a little with Craig Toomy, the evil Bronson Pinchot character. (Actually a highlight of the movie was seeing people beat the crap out of Bronson Pinchot; I always hated Perfect Strangers and his Balki character.) This is not one to read on an airplane!

“Secret Window, Secret Garden” is what King, in his introduction, promises is the last of his “writers” stories, and it's a weird amalgam of Misery and The Dark Half. Saying anything more would be serious spoilerage, and while I question some of the details, I liked it a lot. 

“The Library Policeman” was kind of a one-joke story that is OK, sort of redoing It, in a way, although I have always suspected that librarians were strange creatures that fed on the fear of kids, but is the weakest of the four.

“The Sun Dog” sounds like the kind of story that would have made a good episode of the Rod Serling series Night Gallery: a kid is given a Polaroid camera as a birthday gift, but it takes pictures of things that aren’t there. Namely, a big, black dog. Thing is, each picture seems to be the next frame in a sequence. The dog is turning around, is quite evil and savage, and quite likely will burst out of the pictures and into the “real world.” I really liked that one, and it made a New York-Albany train ride go very fast. 

Grade: B

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1989) 

OK, I was tentative about The Dark Tower for the first two books, but I really liked this one. The ragtag bunch—Roland, Eddie, and Susannah—are becoming three-dimensional, likable characters, and the reclaiming of 11-year-old Jake (first appearing in the first book) makes a great addition, as does a strange otter/dog creature named Oy, which is not as cutesy and annoying as these kinds of pets can be. The adventures begin in earnest, and it does move briskly. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, but it has made me eager for the next installment. 

Grade: A-

Needful Things (1990)

King bade farewell to Castle Rock with this epic, in which an old curiosity shop called Needful Things comes to town. Each person in town manages to find the exact item that will bring them immense joy to own—and the only real price is to play a prank on someone else in town. Soon, just about everyone, except for the local sheriff, is killing each other, all for fear of losing their prized possessions. A parable about a materialistic society, and maybe a bit heavy-handed on that level, but it contains some of King’s best-drawn characters and his sharpest writing. This has always been in my top 5 King books. 

Grade: A 

Uh oh. Gerald’s Game is next. Taking a short jump forward to Doctor Sleep, which just came out. It will be a lo-o-o-ong time before it turns up here, but I am halfway through it and it is very good. 

Fit to Be Crossed

A trip to the North Regional CrossFit Games last May introduced me to the North East Media Director who, as it turned out, was looking for more writers to contribute to the CrossFit Games/CrossFit Journal Web site(s). I am always happy to oblige. And my first assignment—a profile of North East Regional winner Austin Malleolo, is now live here.

The CrossFit Games will take place next weekend, July 26 to 28, at the Home Depot Center in Carson, Calif., close to the West Coast home of the Goodyear blimp. (Carson is one town over from Torrance, where I lived for 3.5 years.) The Games can be watched on ESPN 3 or streamed at the official CrossFit Games site.

Happy Bloomsday...Amongst Other Days

Whilst today is in fact Father's Day—and happy F.D. to all fathers, although my own is apparently doing something involving printing with steamrollers, so my mind is riven with thoughts of a sketch from an old ~1980 Steve Martin TV special warning of the hazards of drinking and driving a steamroller. I can't find it on YouTube, which makes me wonder if it ever actually existed. Anyroad, today is also "Bloomsday," when literature nerds and other assorted dorks (like me) around the world celebrate James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses, which chronicles Leopold Bloom's perambulations around Dublin on June 16, 1904. (Leopold Bloom becomes a father figure to Stephen Dedalus, so it is not un-apropos to Father's Day.) How did I celebate this year? Why, with a special CrossFit workout I made up called "The Bloomsday":

04 rounds for time (not 1904 rounds):

6 thrusters (95#)

16 pull-ups

(my time= 9:21)

Then, because Ulysses was first published in 1922:

4 min AMRAP*:

19 pushups

22 situps

(my roundage= 2 rounds + 19 pushups + 3 situps)

So whether you are a father, or a James Joyce aficionado, or both, or neither, I hope you had a great day!

* I was going to do 18 min AMRAP for each of the 18 "episodes" in the book, but that wasn't gonna happen. 

Ride the King's Highway

Despite the lack of blogging, the Rereading Stephen King Project has actually been continuing behind the scenes. Which does raise the question: if you do something in your life and do not blog, tweet, or update Facebook about it, can it be said that you did it at all? 

Anyway, we continue:

The Talisman (with Peter Straub) (1984)

First off, boy did King (and Straub) really like Lord of the Rings. The Dark Tower and The Stand are King’s solo attempts at a uniquely American LoTR, and his first of two collaborations with Peter Straub (who is perhaps best known for Ghost Story via the 1981 movie) more closely brings to mind Tolkein, except you don’t have to learn Elvish. Jack Sawyer, the 12-year-old son of an old, faded Hollywood actress, finds that his mother is dying from cancer (thanks to a smoking habit). Holing up in a New Hampshire seaside hotel during the offseason, he encounters the caretaker of a nearby carnival, who tells him that, to save his mother, he needs to journey to the West Coast and seek The Talisman, whatever that is. To get there, he can slip into The Territories, a kind of parallel, pre-Industrial Age Earth where the air is clear and fresh, and there are weird flora and fauna. As the situation dictates, Jack flips back and forth between these two worlds and gets caught up in unpleasant jams both prosaic and fantastical. It’s a thick, brick of a book and I did generally like it. One of the big problems I generally have with fantasy is that every single geography has some kind of weird, deadly creature(s) that defy biology (yes, I know, that’s why they call it “fantasy”), but it really does get to be a bit much. The killer trees were pretty creepy (and tres Tolkein), and there is a good showdown between Jack and the force of evil (his dead father’s former business partner—not quite Tolkein, that). It’s a weird, crazy book that actually was worth the time it took to plow through it. Some of the ancillary characters are quite fun (especially Wolf, a werewolf from The Territories, who is a good guy). Ultimately, it’s a story about the power of friendship, as many of King’s books tend to be. The sequel Black House comes up much much later in this series and I will be curious to check it out.

Grade: B-

Thinner (as Richard Bachman) (1984) 

The last of the Bachman books before he was “outed” as Stephen King, Thinner is actually the most King-like of the Bachman books, especially in that it is the densest and longest, tarrying a bit more than the fast-moving, very streamlined earlier Bachman books. In a nutshell, overweight lawyer Billy Halleck (who kind of reminded me a little of Chris Christie) accidentally runs over and kills a Gypsy woman, he had connections that get him acquitted of any charges, so the woman’s father curses him to lose weight...which he does, and drastically. The Battle of the [Lack Of] Bulge is well-done, and the drastic weight loss starts off enviable and then gets creepy and upsetting. Much of the book gets bogged down in the minutiae of Billy’s searching for the Gypsies who cursed him, and then in the details of how an old mob friend terrorized the Gypsies into removing the curse. The thing is, Billy was so clearly in the wrong, and the perversion of justice so egregious that it’s kind of hard to truly be on his side—but I suspect that was the point. (The Bachman books tended to feature anti-heroes were were unlikeable in one way or another.) The real downer ending (a Bachman hallmark) is perhaps for the best. Also, too: the idea of a Gypsy curse. I dunno. It’s one of those old, tired tropes (like the possessed Indian burial ground in Pet Sematary) that would probably have been done a bit differently if King (or anyone) were to write this today.

Grade: B-

Skeleton Crew (1985) 

Another collection of short stories that, like Night Shift, is a mixed bag of the really effective and the really bad, and everything in between. Opening novella “The Mist”—detailing people trapped in a supermarket by the titular mist and the mysterious creatures living within it—is probably one of the truly scariest things King has ever written. (For this reread, I actually did read “The Mist” while on holiday and taking the Eurostar train through the Chunnel, which had added an extra level of creepiness.) Other good stories in this collection include “The Raft” (college students trapped on raft in the middle of a lake get eaten by a weird splotch in the water); “Gramma” (little kid is scared to be alone with his perhaps dying grandmother who happens to be a witch); and a few others. Some (“The Jaunt,” “Word Processor of the Gods”) are okay and would have made good Twilight Zone episodes. An okay collection but some stories were tough to get through.

Grade: C 

It (1986) 

This was about where SK and I parted ways back in the 80s, but reading It for the first time in the 90s and again for this project, this is his magnum opus (so far). It is an immense epic, but it rarely drags. The Losers Club are some of his most endearing characters and we really get to know them, as kids and as adults, over the course of the book. It could use some editing and rearranging (the chapter in which all seven of the kids meet doesn’t come until more than halfway through the book, some early chapters are wasted detailing the lives of characters we will never meet again, and the “Derry Interludes” do seem a bit beside the point), but it/It really does keep you going for its length. Clowns are truly frightening to begin with, so Pennywise’s earthly incarnation made perfect sense. But it’s really a story about childhood and friendship, the last time, actually, that King would address these themes. There was a pretty awful TV miniseries made in the 90s that starred mostly sitcom actors, although Tim Curry stole the show as the evil clown.

Grade: A

The Eyes of the Dragon (1987)

A young adult (sort of) fantasy novel about princes and assassinated kings and evil magicians, written, as the story goes, for his daughter who did not are for his more typical fare. It’s a not unsatisfying read, and has some wry takes on the fantasy genre. There are some connections to The Dark Tower; the assassinated king is named Roland while the evil magician is named Flagg (also from The Stand). Peter, Roland’s elder son and heir to the throne, is blamed for the king’s murder and his brother Thomas—who is not a particularly adept ruler—is put on throne so as to be Flagg’s manipulatee. (The idea of “Dragon Sand,” the poison that kills Roland, is pure, unadulterated King.) Peter’s plan to escape the tower in which he is imprisoned is, shall we say, unique. (You will never look at napkins the same way again.) All in all, a unique decidedly Kingean take on a classic genre. 

Grade: B-

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987)

The second installment of The Dark Tower epic seems a bit more directed and intentional than the first volume, which was a collection of a couple of shorter pieces. Volume II has the sense that it’s going somewhere. At the beginning, our gunslinger Roland has been attacked by giant mutant lobsters (called lobstrosities, a neologism I shall have to use). Dispossessed of a couple of fingers and toes, he is in desperate need of medicine. On the beach on which he is trapped, there are three doors, for some reason, and through them lie the three people he needs to choose (aka abduct) who will accompany him on his journey to the Dark Tower. All three doors lead to our world, specifically New York City at various times, and Roland manages to take possession of the bodies of the people who will accompany him, battling various folk in our world before dragging them back to his. The first is a 1980s-era 18-year-old heroin addict and smuggler (Eddie), the second is an African-American woman from the 60s who not only has had her legs severed in a freak subway accident but who also suffers from multiple personality disorder (Odetta), the alternate personality (Detta) being a psychotic. The third actually is not intended to be part of Roland’s gang, and is a psycho who gets off on randomly injuring or killing people, including the character of Jake who ended up in Roland’s world in the first book. He is dealt a very brutal fate, appropriately, and his demise (he was responsible for Odetta losing her legs) results in her two personalities merging and becoming a third person, Susannah. (Yeah, this is where the book kind of lost me, and at about the same point where the first book lost me.) Still, I remain intrigued and will forge ahead when Volume III comes up a few books hence. 

Grade: B-

Misery (1987)

Probably the quintessential Stephen King book, the one everyone probably knows from the hit movie, one of the best King adaptations, and it really is hard to not see Kathy Bates as the psychotic Annie Wilkes. She was perfectly cast. (James Caan as Paul Sheldon...well, not so much.) Everyone knows the plot: writer Paul Sheldon, author of a bestselling series of Victorian romance novels about Misery Chastain, is rescued from a road accident by his "number one fan," who then proceeds to torture him for a) killing off Misery in his latest book, hoping to end the series, b) having written a contemporary novel about a foul-mouthed car thief, and c) trying to escape. At her request (via an axe), he writes a new Misery novel in which she comes back from the dead in very Stephen King fashion. There are some differences between the book and movie (in the book, she chops off his foot and his thumb), but both are very well-done. This would be the ideal gateway Stephen King novel, as it is pretty short and devoid of any supernatural elements. I also get the sense that it would be a vicarious thrill for any writer buttonholed into a specific genre or series—as indeed King has been buttonholed as a horror writer.  

Grade: A

Coming up...The Tommyknockers, The Dark Half, and Part III of The Dark Tower...just as soon as I clear my palate with something else for a bit.