Book #99 of 2017: Doctor Sleep by Stephen King (The Shining #2) I’m still not convinced that Stephen King needed to write a sequel to his classic book The Shining, especially after the original had stood on its own for over 30 years. But for an author who struggled with addiction for much of his …
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Book #62 of 2017: The Regulators by Richard Bachman This pseudonymous Stephen King novel has too many characters with not enough characterization, which makes it hard to keep track of them or even care when they kept getting gunned down. It doesn’t help that most of the characters share names – but not much else …
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TV #2 of 2017: 11.22.63 I ended up really liking this adaptation of the Stephen King story where the guy goes back in time to try and save JFK, even though they changed a lot of what I loved about the book. But the core of the story is still there, and even James Franco …
Book #133 of 2016: The Green Mile by Stephen King A well-told story, albeit with one of the most literal and egregious uses of the ‘magical negro’ trope. And it’s neat that Stephen King wrote this as a serial, so that the first chapters were already published before he even knew how the story would …
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Book #115 of 2016: Desperation by Stephen King Desperation is a decent Stephen King story, flavored with hints of Dark Tower connections but never really connecting with that other mythos. This novel features King at his scariest, but only for its first hundred pages or so, when it appears to be just about a deranged …
Book #88 of 2016: Joyland by Stephen King Stephen King captures the particular aimlessness of a college student currently in between life dreams, but the plot of Joyland doesn’t have any real flashes of brilliance like the best of his work. It’s a perfectly adequate summer read, but so much of it – the psychic …
Book #80 of 2016: Skeleton Crew by Stephen King This is a mixed bag, as short story collections so often are, but three stories really stand out from the crowd. “The Mist,” like its film adaptation, is a tense thriller of man-versus-monster that captures the fragility of our everyday lives and how quickly a routine …
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Book #54 of 2016: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne begins with an irresistible premise: a crotchety old Maine woman walking into a police station to confess to a murder. It largely lives up to that premise, helped along by the unique (for King) narrative structure, which presents Dolores’s story as one …
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Book #46 of 2016: Needful Things by Stephen King Needful Things is better than The Tommyknockers, but not as good as ‘Salem’s Lot – two other Stephen King novels that share its same basic story structure of a supernatural presence slowly corrupting and effectively destroying a small town. The fact that Needful Things is set …
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Book #35 of 2016: Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub (The Talisman #2) Most of Stephen King’s books connect to his other stories in one way or another, a process that’s aided by his Dark Tower series positing that all worlds are intertwined. Sometimes these connections between stories can be as simple as …
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