Book #21 of 2018: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #4) This was always my favorite novel in Stephen King’s epic sprawling Dark Tower series, and although I’m a bit longer in the tooth now than when I first read it, I’m excited to see that the story is just as great …
Continue reading “Book Review: Wizard and Glass by Stephen King”
Book #260 of 2017: The Waste Lands by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #3) This third book in my reread of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is just as great as I had remembered. If Book 1 mostly serves to introduce the weird world of this story, and Book 2 serves to recruit the supporting …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Waste Lands by Stephen King”
Book #256 of 2017: End of Watch by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) This last book in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy is unfortunately a bit of a mess. Partly that’s due to the tonal whiplash of following up two fairly straightforward crime thrillers with a story about hypnotic mind control, telekinesis, and bodyswaps, …
Continue reading “Book Review: End of Watch by Stephen King”
Book #238 of 2017: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King Another solid collection of short fiction from author Stephen King. The standout entry is Ur, a Dark Tower-adjacent novella about an e-reader that can access books from alternate realities, but King also offers up some delightful creepiness in Morality, Under the Weather, and …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King”
Book #213 of 2017: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #2) Although this second novel in the Dark Tower series takes place just after the first, author Stephen King hits the ground running with immediate deadly peril and a propulsive cross-dimensional adventure. It’s a dramatic shift in pace from the …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Drawing of the Three by Stephen King”
Book #206 of 2017: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King This is a fairly typical early Stephen King collection: a few stories are great, most are simply good, and a couple are pretty bad. On the upper end of that scale we have Dolan’s Cadillac, which is a King take on The Cask of Amontillado, …
Continue reading “Book Review: Nightmares & Dreamscapes by Stephen King”
Book #163 of 2017: The Gunslinger by Stephen King (The Dark Tower #1) It’s probably been a good decade or more since I last read this book, and I was surprised to find it better than I had remembered. I still stand by my usual advice for the Dark Tower series, which is that you …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Gunslinger by Stephen King”
Book #162 of 2017: Finders Keepers by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy #2) This second novel in Stephen King’s Bill Hodges trilogy presents a more interesting case than the first, even if the detective and his partners feel largely extraneous to the story. The principal conflict centers on a villain who killed a famous author …
Continue reading “Book Review: Finders Keepers by Stephen King”
Book #129 of 2017: The Dark Man by Stephen King This illustrated poem is more atmospheric than substantive, an early character sketch of the figure who would eventually grow to be Stephen King’s recurring villain Randall Flagg. King wrote the poem when he was in college – well before Flagg would first pop up in …
Continue reading “Book Review: The Dark Man by Stephen King”
Book #123 of 2017: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy #1) This novel lost steam for me as it went along (especially once I realized that a promising new character was just Stephen King’s version of Lisbeth Salander), but for the most part King has delivered an exciting crime thriller about a retired …
Continue reading “Book Review: Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King”
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more