BEWARE OF SPOILERS

Saturday 24 September 2011

It : 24th September 2011

ITI've found that the latter stages of each book become almost as much about looking to the next one as finding out how this one turns out.  It's something I've come to regretfully accept as part of my being able to keep things, however slowly, moving.  With a couple of them, the steam-ahead mentality has definitely encroached on the current book and my immersion in it.  Most recently this was definitely the case with The Talisman.  To a lesser extent, it also affected Skeleton Crew.  The loom of a 1000+ pages and both the reputation and my own memories of the book will do that to you, though.

I'm looking forward to It though.  I can't remember a lot about it from my reading of it as a kid, which pleases me more than the failure of my memory worries me.  One thing that keeps cropping up in my mind when facing this book, or any of such a prodigious girth, is the feeling I always had as a kid where I couldn't fathom ever finishing the thing.  From my crawling start of new books, tapping away at the outer shell of the story, waiting for the crack to appear before I could wheedle my way inside, the road seemed so long and the horizon so far away that just getting moving seemed hard to realise.

Of course I always did and the walk through the first chapters turned into a jog and a run through the middle and a sprint to the finish.  But the cycle always reset and I'd return to that same awed approach to the next one.  I'm a bit older now, so the awe is considerably diminished (until I think about the writing process involved in creating these behemoths) but, facing It, there's a glimmer of it there.  It's just a case of putting one foot in front of the other and turning the page...

I was trying to show the heft of the book with the picture and thought I'd use another for comparison.  There was only one choice.  This shit writes itself sometimes.  Or maybe it's the Fornits.

Skeleton Crew: 22nd August - 23rd September 2011

So, I finished the last three stories of Skeleton Key.

With Gramma, I couldn't help wishing he'd stuck to the real horror of the situation and not drifted off to the supernatural.  The elderly and infirm carry an accepted weight of creepiness that is only surpassed by the idea of being alone with an actual corpse.  What the imagination is capable of in that situation is just as terrifying and debilitating as he describes and he does a great job of provoking our unease.  Unfortunately, the ending felt cheap and washed most of that away.

The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet suffered a similar fate by making the Fornits real.  There would have been enough mileage in real insanity for me. 

The Reach was just a bit shit. 

Overall, I enjoyed Skeleton Crew much more then I did Night Shift.  From the sounds of things, critical opinion agrees.  But who cares about that?

Considering the strength of the opening story/novella - The Mist - we were off to a flying start and, while there were a few dips, there were enough crackers in there to keep its head above the waters of 'chore reading' and wanting to cast the book aside to move on to the next thing.
Skeleton Crew

Devour this...

I'm not the only one to have had this idea of reading the complete Stephen King and heartily recommend you check out Laura's blog - http://devouringtexts.blogspot.com
Not only does she write much longer and more interesting posts on the books, she also offers a much more critical review.
The thing that really blows me away about this blog is that not only does it not take Laura a month plus to read each book, she's reading and watching much more besides and writing similarly involved posts for all of them.
For her Stephen King posts, go to http://devouringtexts.blogspot.com/p/challenges.html and scroll down a bit. While you're there, get stuck into check the rest of the blog. It is awesome.

Monday 19 September 2011

Skeleton Crew - the stories so far

So much for writing about each story… I’m partway through the antepenultimate story of the collection Gramma, and have the time for quick round-up so far. I haven’t stopped to do a bit for each story, mainly because I’m conscious of how long it takes me to get through each book and want to keep going. I’ve enough (mainly self-imposed) distractions, without constantly breaking off from reading to cobble together some trivial and obtuse reflections.

Here There Be Tygers
Meh.

The Monkey
Not bad.

Cain Rose Up
Not bad. An obvious precursor to the Bachman book; Rage

Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut
I liked this one quite a bit. I know the fantasy element was king, but I was most taken by the gentle earnestness and almost childlike honesty and wonder of Homer’s character.

The Jaunt
I realised, reading this story, what turns me off of science fiction as a genre. The gimmicky imagination of futuristic details, from the names of newspapers to spaceship systems, galaxies and planets and the attempt to make the impossible sound simultaneously fantastical and commonplace bores me. I’m a bit too lazy to wade through the assimilation of all of that conceit to find out whether the story is actually worth reading. It’s just the icing, when what really matters is how good the actual cake is. Luckily, I really liked The Jaunt. I didn’t see the end coming, but then again, I rarely try to second guess story arcs and endings and was happily swept up, surprised and horrified by it. Nice.

The Wedding Gig
A decent read, but nothing special. Probably most interesting to me for its Prohibition setting and detail.

Paranoid: A Chant
Poetry takes a fair amount of effort for me to even begin to give a shit. I’ll confess to being a lazy reader, especially in my approach to King. By that I mean I’ll be present enough to follow the narrative, suspend my disbelief and generally be an active reader in entertaining the ideas as presented and making necessary leaps, but I’m not approaching him with anything resembling literary criticism. Nothing has the potential to kill art quite like study and criticism. Poetry doesn’t do much for me. I can’t be bothered to deconstruct it or engage in trying to fathom the arcane references and stylistic implications of the form, meter and rhyme. I go through a perhaps biennial phase of immersion in poetry, but that’s about it. Sticking it in the middle of a collection of King’s short stories is met by a skim-read at best or skipped at worst.

I know, I’m an ignorant prick.

The Raft
Not bad, not great.

Word Processor of the Gods
Nice.

The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands
As soon as I realised it was from the same world as The Breathing Method from Different Seasons, I got excited. As the one story from Different Seasons that was completely new to me, I got a lot from it (http://thekinglongread.blogspot.com/2011/03/different-seasons-20th-february-29th.html) returning to that world heightened by anticipation. Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly in the same league and not nearly as satisfying. Not shit, though.

Beachworld
Pah.

The Reaper’s Image
Bleh.

Nona
Pretty good but a part of me wishes it had been longer and Nona was real.
For Owen
See above – (Paranoid: A Chant)

Survivor Type
Great stuff. Proto-Palahniuk?

Uncle Otto’s Truck
Not great, not altogether shit.

Morning Deliveries (Milkman #1)
A nice little sketch.

Big Wheels: A Tale of The Laundry Game (Milkman #2)
A decent enough read but there wasn't much point overall.  Bob killing his wife was a nice touch, though.

Listening
Marc Maron's WTF podcast.  http://www.wtfpod.com  Awesome.  Great guests.  I'd go so far as saying it eclipses his stand-up too.  Which is not a statement I make lightly.

Also, Chris Hardwick's Nerdist podcast. http://www.nerdist.com

Also reading:
Jeff Lemire's Sweet Tooth.  Amazingly good.

Watching:
The Office (US) - much better than I expected and a really good show in its own right.
Louie - the second series is as good as the first.

Thursday 1 September 2011

The Mist (Skeleton Crew) 22nd-31st August 2011

I thought I might as well do a post for each story as it’ll probably take an age to get through the whole of Skeleton Crew.


So, so good! I dawdled over the first third, slipping in a long weekend of comic reading, but I couldn’t put it down for the last hundred pages. It felt like the perfect horror story to me (and the perfect length – but that’s a whole other issue) with a tight, claustrophobic focus on the human reaction to the unknown threat. While there was some description of the physical detail of the threat, the fact that so much was hidden in the mist and left to the imagination made, for the most part, fear itself the bogeyman of the piece.

The way that the purported cause of the mist and its Legion was only alluded to in passing was also a huge factor in cranking up the unease. And the ending!!! You know that so many people will have put the book down unsatisfied with all the unanswered questions. Ha ha, fuck ‘em.