I had nothing to go on before reading this apart from my cursory knowledge of the movie and that Stephen King wrote this novel in a drunken stupor which he barely remembers. Which is to say, I held little hope for a story about a rabid dog that traps a mother and son in their car. Despite the fact that this book seriously ruined the ability for anyone to call their dog Cujo, I don’t really consider it a horror novel. This is the story […]
A great mystery in translation
I love a good mystery and The Ice Queen had a killer (pun intended) premise. German detectives find Jossi Goldberg shot execution style with a number drawn in blood near the body. As a 92-year-old Holocaust survivor, he isn’t the likeliest of murder victims. After getting him in for an autopsy however, they find that his arm has an unsuccessfully covered tatoo of his blood type, a sure sign that he was once part of the SS. Detectives Kirchhoff and Bodenstein must find out who […]
Lazy Daisies…Mild Wildflowers…
Another unfortunate victim of “if you loved Gone Girl” syndrome. I felt like this was very mild as far as thrillers go, which sounds crazy considering that this is the story of Tessa, the lone surviving Black-Eyed Susan who was dumped in a grave with other victims of a serial killer. As an adult, Tessa is unsure that the man scheduled to die for the crimes is the true killer and she seeks out legal help to exonerate the convicted man. The chapters alternate from […]
Starring Kojak, formerly known as Big Steve, a Very Good Dog
My blossoming love affair with Stephen King continues, with yet another behemoth of awesomeness: The Stand. This particular edition was released in 1990, twelve years after the first release. It was updated and expanded, and I have no reference to the first edition but, according to “Publisher’s Weekly,” at least as quoted on amazon.com, “The same excellent tale of the walking dude, the chemical warfare weapon called superflu and the confrontation between its survivors has been updated to 1990, so references to Teenage Mutant Ninja […]
Gillian Flynn is the M Night Shyamalan of Literature
Because boy does she love her plot twists, and throwing plot twists in the middle of her plot twists. I probably would have enjoyed this book more when it came out, or before I had read any of Flynn’s other stories. Or before Gone Girl, and anyone who hadn’t read her books could remain ignorant of this reputation. But I have read some of her other stories, and I know all about her love of plot twists. I wasn’t really on the lookout for the […]
Sometimes the things presented to us as choices aren’t choices at all.
Few writers can gut punch readers with an ending the way Stephen King can. Written in the first person, 11/22/63 is ominous from the start. But why it is so ominous takes over 850 pages to understand. For all his flaws with endings, the final lines are usually cutting. Take another story told in first person, The Green Mile. It’s only at the end, the very end, that the true cost of the story is revealed with that haunting final line “We each owe a […]
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