According to many Constant Readers, this is Uncle Stevie’s worst book, but I don’t agree! It is extremely flawed, but I also found it very readable (it probably helped that Edward Herrmann narrates the audiobook, and he is a wonderful audiobook narrator).
This is sci-fi horror. A woman named Bobbie, a writer of western novels, finds a buried object in the ground and becomes obsessed with unearthing it. Doing so changes her and the town she lives in forever, and in really really creepy ways. Our main character is actually another writer, though, a poet named Gardener, who is a suicidal alcoholic who is on his last leg, but goes to help out his friend Bobbie anyway.
The main problem is that there is anywhere between 200-400 pages of extraneous content that is unnecessary for the story. I am a fan of his longer books usually, but usually the length is justified by the story. Here, it wasn’t. This should have been max 500-600 pages. Towards the end of the book, I was approaching the climax, and there was still ten hours to go! Some of the ending was really fun (flying murderous Coke machines), but some of it was just indulgent. I’m glad SK cleaned up his act after this book, for more than one reason, but it seems as if from reading this one that it really was time.
I was really nervous about this one, but it was perfectly fine! Charming, even. Rounding up because I can.
[3.5 stars, rounded up]
CBR BINGO: Green
