Book Review | Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King & Owen King

All around the world, something is happening to women when they fall asleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed, the women become feral and spectacularly violent...

In the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, the virus is spreading through a women's prison, affecting all the inmates except one. Soon, word spreads about the mysterious Evie, who seems able to sleep—and wake. Is she a medical anomaly or a demon to be slain?

The abandoned men, left to their increasingly primal devices, are fighting each other, while Dooling's Sheriff, Lila Norcross, is just fighting to stay awake.

And the sleeping women are about to open their eyes to a new world altogether...

***

On the back of the broadly brilliant Bill Hodges books, a succinct and suspenseful series of straight stories that only started to flag when their fantastical aspects filibustered the fiction, Sleeping Beauties sees Stephen King up to his old tricks again. It's a long, long novel that places a vast cast of characters at the mercy of a speculative premise: a sleeping sickness that knocks all the women of the world out for the count, leaving the men to fend for themselves.

Of course, the world is not now, nor has it ever been, King's business. Standing in for it in this particular story, as a microcosm of all that's right and wrong or spineless and strong, is a small town "splat in the middle of nowhere," (p.30) namely Dooling in West Virginia. There, tempers flare—and soon explosively so—when it dawns on a dizzying array of dudes that their wives and daughters and whatnot may be gone for good. It's Under the Dome part deux, in other words, except that this time, the Constant Writer has roped one of his sons in on the fun.

The author of an excellent short story collection, a gonzo graphic novel and an overwritten love letter to the silver screen, Owen King is clearly capable of greatness, but—rather like his father—falls short as often as not. I'd hoped to see him at his best here, what with the help of an old hand, however it's hard to see him at all, so consistent is the Kings' collaboration. But as tough as it is to tell where one King ends and the other begins, Sleeping Beauties is such a slog that it hardly matters.

Book Review | End of Watch by Stephen King

Retired Detective Bill Hodges now runs a two-person firm called Finders Keepers with his partner Holly Gibney. They met in the wake of the Mercedes Massacre, when a queue of people was run down by the diabolical killer Brady Hartsfield.

Brady is now confined to Room 217 of the Lakes Region Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic, in an unresponsive state. But all is not what it seems: the evidence suggests that Brady is somehow awake, and in possession of deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.

When Bill and Holly are called to a suicide scene with ties to the Mercedes Massacre, they find themselves pulled into their most dangerous case yet, one that will put their lives at risk, as well as those of Bill's heroic young friend Jerome Robinson and his teenage sister, Barbara. Brady Hartsfield is back, and planning revenge not just on Hodges and his friends, but on an entire city.

The clock is ticking in unexpected ways...

***

The Bill Hodges trilogy that began with the Edgar Award-winning Mr Mercedes and continued in last year's fearsome Finders Keepers comes to an uncharacteristically concise close in End of Watch, a finale which finds Stephen King's determined old det-ret racing against the clock to get to the bottom of a string of suicides he thinks could be linked to the malignant mind behind the Mercedes Massacre:

On a foggy morning in 2009, a maniac named Brady Hartsfield drove a stolen Mercedes Benz into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center, downtown. He killed eight and seriously injured fifteen. [...] Martine Stover had been the toughest [survivor] to talk to, and not only because her disfigured mouth made her all but impossible to understand for anyone except her mother. Stover was paralysed from the chest down. (p.16)

The adjustment has been damned difficult, but in the seven years since the incident, Martine has come to terms with her limited mobility. She and her mother, who stepped up to the plate in the wake of that darkest of dates, have grown closer than ever before. They've been, by all accounts, happy—hard as that might for some outsiders to imagine—and happy people don't force overdoses on their dearly beloved daughters then takes cannisters of gas into the bath, do they?

Because of Hodges' history with Hartsfield, he and his recalcitrant partner Holly Gibney are, as a courtesy, invited to see the scene of what the police are keen to call a murder-suicide, and although the evidence in support of that theory is clear, when our PIs find a Zappit—a budget-brand tablet Hodges has seen the object of his obsession play with in the past—they can't help but suspect a connection.

But how could Mr Mercedes be involved in the deaths of Martine Stover and Janice Ellerton when he's basically brain-dead himself?

Book Review | The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

A master storyteller at his best—the O. Henry Prize winner Stephen King delivers a generous collection of stories, several of them brand-new, featuring revelatory autobiographical comments on when, why, and how he came to write (or rewrite) each story.

Since his first collection, Nightshift, published thirty-five years ago, Stephen King has dazzled readers with his genius as a writer of short fiction. In this new collection he assembles, for the first time, recent stories that have never been published in a book. He introduces each with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it.

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. 'Afterlife' is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanours. Other stories address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers—the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in 'Obits'; the old judge in 'The Dune' who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, the names of people who then died in freak accidents. In 'Morality,' King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil’s pact they can win.

Magnificent, eerie, utterly compelling, these stories comprise one of King’s finest gifts to his constant reader. "I made them especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."

***

"I never feel the limitations of my talent so keenly as I do when writing short fiction," confesses Stephen King in the introduction to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: an unusually introspective yet no less effective collection of eighteen variously terrifying tales, plus a few pieces of poetry, from the affable author of last year's similarly reflective Revival.

This is far from the first time King has discussed his "struggle to bridge the gap between a great idea and the realisation of that idea's potential," and although, as readers, we only have the end product to parse, the ideas the Edgar Award winner explores here—and the characters, and the narratives—are not at all inadequate. If anything, in dispensing with the hallmarks of Halloweeny horror to which his bibliography is so bound in order to investigate a goody bag of markedly more grounded goings-on, the stories brought together in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams number among King's most thoughtful and evocative.

Which isn't to say they ain't scary. They absolutely are! 'Premium Harmony,' 'Batman and Robin Have an Altercation' and 'Herman Wouk is Still Alive,' for instance, are still seething somewhere under this critic's skin, but said tales are scary in a more mundane way than you might imagine. Respectively, they address the mindless last fight between a man and his wife, the hellish senselessness of senility and suicide as a means of finally achieving freedom.

If the components of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams have a common denominator, and I dare say they do, it's death... but death by misadventure, or as a direct result of dubious decisions, or as something that simply comes, like the setting of the sun, as opposed to death by killer car, or wicked witch, or eldritch mist. According to Dave Calhoun, the elderly subject of 'Mr Yummy,' a bittersweet story set in an Assisted Living facility, "death personified isn't a skeleton riding on a pale horse with a scythe over his shoulder, but a hot dancehall kid with glitter on his cheeks." (p.350)

Death is depicted in countless other, equally ordinary ways over the course of The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: as a name sketched in the sand in 'The Dune,' an unpleasant smell in 'Under the Weather' and an increasingly meek mutt in 'Summer Thunder.' King hasn't suddenly come over all subtle, but this collection clearly chronicles a gentler, more contemplative author than the purveyor of penny dreadfuls whose part he has played with such panache in the past.

Book Review | Finders Keepers by Stephen King

"Wake up, genius."

So begins King's instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, a Salinger-like icon who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn't published a book for decades. 

Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he's released from prison after thirty-five years.

Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever.

***

I'm probably preaching to the converted here, but let me let you in on a little secret to some: though books are a big deal to people like you and me, we're outnumbered and undoubtedly outgunned by those folks who wind their way through life without ever really reading. To them, the way we've committed to literature is... quite simply inexplicable.

What they don't know—and what we, the enlightened, indubitably do—is that great writing can change lives. Great writing like the work of one John Rothstein, creator of Jimmy Gold, the real American hero at the heart of The Runner trilogy. On the basis of those books, a legion of readers "judged Rothstein to be one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, right up there with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Roth." (p.85)

Morris Bellamy, a twisted little twentysomething whose mom doesn't love him enough in the late 70s of Finders Keepers' first chapters, is one of said series' dyed-in-the-wool devotees—right up until he slaughters its author.

Book Review | Revival by Stephen King

In a small New England town, in the early 60s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Charles Jacobs. Soon they forge a deep bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity.

Decades later, Jamie is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll. Now an addict, he sees Jacobs again—a showman on stage, creating dazzling 'portraits in lightning'—and their meeting has profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings.

A masterpiece in the great American tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, this rich and disturbing novel spans five decades on its way to the most terrifying conclusion Stephen King has ever written.

***

Whether you love his work or loathe it—and there are those who do, difficult as that is for those who don't to discern—you've got to give Stephen King credit, in the first for working so damned hard. Over the forty years of his career, he's written fifty-odd novels, and financially, you have to imagine he'd have been sitting pretty after the first five.

This, then, isn't a man who does what he does for the money. Demonstrably, I dare say, he does it for the fun, and that's a fine thing, I think; after all, to paraphrase Dreamcatcher's central character, doing the same shit day after day does get dull, and dull is the last thing a writer writing recreationally can afford to be. To escape that fate, King has reinvented himself repeatedly in recent years. He's come up with a couple of very credible crime thrillers, commingled conspiracy with the stuff of science fiction and composed love letters to the old days and ways.

In that respect, Revival is a real throwback. A supernatural horror novel of the sort not seen since Duma Key, it's classic King, complete with fantastic characters, a suggestive premise and an ending I'm going to politely describe as divisive.

Revival begins reflectively:

In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies. The main cast consists of your family and friends. The supporting cast is made up of neighbours, co-workers, teachers, and daily acquaintances. There are also bit players: the supermarket checkout girl with the pretty smile, the friendly bartender at the local watering hole, the guys you work out with at the gym three days a week. And there are thousands of extras—those people who flow through every life like water through a sieve, seen once and never again. [...] But sometimes a person who fits none of these categories comes into your life. This is the joker who pops out of the deck at odd intervals over the years, often during a moment of crisis. In the movies this sort of character is known as the fifth business, or the change agent. When he turns up in a film, you know he's there because the screenwriter put him there. But who is screenwriting our lives? (p.1)

There's a lot in this paragraph to unpack: the idea of the illusion of life; the allusion, not unrelatedly, to God as the author of all; and an introduction to the narrative's eventual antagonist, Reverend Charles Jacobs. Let's focus on that last.

Book Review | Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

A riveting cat-and-mouse suspense thriller about a retired cop and a couple of unlikely allies who race against time to stop a lone killer intent on blowing up thousands.

Retired homicide detective Bill Hodges is haunted by the few cases he left open, and by one in particular: in the pre-dawn hours, hundreds of desperate unemployed people were lined up for a spot at a job fair in the distressed Midwestern city where he worked. Without warning, a lone driver ploughed through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes. Eight people were killed, fifteen wounded. The killer escaped.

Months later, on the other side of city, Bill Hodges gets a taunting letter in the mail, from a man claiming to be the perpetrator. Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent hunting him down.

Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. And he is preparing to kill again.

Hodges, with a couple of misfit friends, must apprehend the killer in a high-stakes race against time. Because Brady's next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim hundreds, even thousands.

***

On the back of a forgettable follow-up to one of the finest fantastical fictions he's written, Stephen King delivers a straight serial killer story with a difference of no small significance: in Mr Mercedes, one of our two main characters is the murderer. The other? His next victim, naturally.

The killing starts in the darkness of a day in April, several years before the events documented in the rest of the text. A job fair is to take place at the local auditorium, and the most motivated folks have been waiting at the gates for ages. They say the early bird catches the worm—some of these birds won't last much longer without one—so when a big gray Mercedes rolls up around sunrise, they think it must be the Mayor, come to commend them for their dedication.

It isn't. It's the last thing a lot of the jobseekers will see.

The car accelerated directly at the place where the crowd of jobseekers was most tightly packed, and hemmed in by the DO NOT CROSS tapes. Some of them tried to run, but only the ones at the rear of the crowed were able to break free. Those closer to the doors—the true Early Birds—had no chance. They struck the posts and knocked them over, they got tangled in the tapes, they rebounded off each other. The crowd swayed back and forth in a series of agitated waves. Those who were older and smaller fell down and were trampled underfoot. (pp.10-11)

The driver of the twelve-cylinder sedan kills eight and injures any number of others, and as if that weren't awful enough, he gets away with it as well.

This unsolved homicide has haunted Detective Bill Hodges ever since—even into his retirement, which he hasn't handled well in any event. He's wasting daylight on drink and terrible television, and seriously considering suicide, when he's sent a poison-pen letter, postmarked with a smiley face. Hodges has seen such a sticker before, on the steering wheel of the vehicle of evil, and his hunch is on the money: the note is from none other than Mr Mercedes, taunting him to pull the trigger of the Smith & Wesson he keeps on the occasional table by his chair.

The letter sets off a spark in Hodges' heart; a spark that catches fire; a fire that spreads until it's fully-fledged.

Trailer Trash | A Coffee for Carrie

You folks know me by now. As often as not, I'm all about the horror — and at this time of year, there's normally no stopping me. But to be perfectly frank, I could give a flying fig about Kimberly Pierce's forthcoming remake of Carrie.

From the latest trailer, it looks like a shot-for-shot retread of Brian de Palma's classic adaptation of the original Stephen King story:

Maybe it's just me, but I simply don't see the need — never mind the fact that I don't buy Chloë Grace Moretz as a high school outcast for a single solitary second.

On the other hand, something fun has come of this brand new Carrie. It's led, of late, to some instant classic viral marketing. The following was filmed at a New York coffee shop:

Incredibly, this clip has already clocked up in excess of 16 million views at the time of this writing, and it was only uploaded on Monday. I suppose I can see why. I for one can't help but wonder what I'd have done in the same situation... other, that is, than run.

Mind you, the canny marketing of Carrie doesn't make me any more likely to invest in any way, shape or form in this ridiculous reboot.

Book Review | Joyland by Stephen King

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IndieBound / The Book Depository

College student Devin Jones took the summer job at Joyland hoping to forget the girl who broke his heart. But he wound up facing something far more terrible: the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and dark truths about life — and what comes after — that would change his world forever.

A riveting story about love and loss, about growing up and growing old — and about those who don’t get to do either because death comes for them before their time — Joyland is Stephen King at the peak of his storytelling powers. With all the emotional impact of King masterpieces such as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, Joyland is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved.

***

After a lamentably uneventful 2012, Stephen King kicks off what looks to be an unusually huge year for fans of the master of modern pop horror with a small but perfectly formed mystery novel. Joyland is the second story King has written for Hard Case Crime, and like The Colorado Kid — which SyFy has since adapted into a reasonably successful TV series that deals with the weird and the wonderful on a weekly basis — it comes complete with throwback cover art by Hard Case mainstay Glen Orbik and a fantastic, nostalgic narrative.

Joyland takes the form of a tale told by an old man looking back on the last year of his youth:

1973 was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, the year Richard Nixon announced he was not a crook, the year Edward G. Robinson and Noel Coward died. It was Devin Jones's lost year. I was a twenty-one year-old virgin with literary aspirations. I possessed three pairs of bluejeans, four pairs of Jockey shorts, a clunker Ford (with a good radio), occasional suicidal ideations, and a broken heart. 

Sweet, huh? (pp.12-13)

Devin — or Dev to his friends, who flit in and out of the fiction like memories lost and found again — Dev, then, is in the process of the processing the loss of his first love, a heartbreaker called Wendy Keegan who leaves our young man hanging when she sashays on down to a job in Boston. At first, Dev doesn't know what to do without her, so when the prospect of employment at a nearby amusement park quite literally lands on his lap, he takes the opportunity by the horns, looking to lose himself in something all-consuming.

Joyland is absolutely that. But Dev's star turn as a Happy Hound will eat up much more than all the time and energy he suddenly has on his hands: to tell the truth, it will consume his youth.

King's many admirers will be pleased to hear Joyland showcases the author of The Shining and this year's never-mind-how-needful sequel, Doctor Sleep, at the top of his game. It's rather more reminiscent of Duma Key and Different Seasons than the aforementioned classic, and more interested, in the main, in natural characters than supernatural factors, but be that as it may, Joyland bears its fair share of thrills and chills.

So sit back. Relax. Make yourself a plate of something, perhaps.

"And I'll tell you the sad story of the Joyland ghost while you eat, if you want to hear it." 

"Is it really a ghost story?" 

"I've never been in that damn funhouse, so I don't know for sure. But it's a murder story. That much I am sure of." (p.35)

Dev hasn't been at Joyland for long when he first hears tell of this spectre. Supposedly, she's the ghost of a girl who was murdered by her as-yet-unidentified boyfriend halfway through the Horror House.

That this homicide happened years back is a tragic fact; that something remains of poor Linda Gray to this day is probably just local legend. Dev becomes taken with the tale in any case. He begins by looking into the circumstances of the slaying — one of a number done by a serial killer with an apparent fondness for fairs. Then, when a friend of Dev's says he sees her, and another makes a dangerous breakthrough, his investigation steps up a gear.

This aspect of the narrative unfolds slowly — in fact, it's only towards the end that said thread takes front and centre — but there's more than enough going on in the interim to retain the reader's interest. Early on, Dev meets Annie and Mike, a single mother and her sickly son, who suffers from Duchenne's Muscular Dystrophy, and I dare say this pair play a more meaningful role in Joyland's story than the so-called ghost of Linda Gray. In what is far and away the novel's most emotional moment, Dev takes it upon himself to show Mike the time of his life. And when he finally rises into the sky, "up where the air is rare," (p.229) I had myself a bit of a cry.

A murderer is unmasked come the climax, and there is, admittedly, a slight speculative edge to the entire affair, but Joyland is no horror novel, nor is the "hard-boiled crime fiction" this imprint traffics in a particularly fitting description. What we have here is a coming of age tale, primarily; a beautiful book, warm and honest, about a boy becoming a man, and his tempered transformation really does pack a punch.

In the exceedingly unlikely event that Stephen King is only remembered for one thing, I warrant it will be his talent for crafting characters, which I'd assert is especially evident in this text. In Mike and Annie, not to mention Tom and Erin, Lane and Fred and Eddie — and it wouldn't do to forget dear Dev himself — King conjures living, breathing people out of thin air, often in the space of a few paltry pages.

Here, however, his sense of setting is also on top form. Joyland is a magnificent place to spend a weekend immersed in, and the surrounding area is nearly as well realised. Here's how the old-timer who owns the amusement park puts its purpose:

"This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. Those of you who don't already know that will come to know it. Give such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun. In exchange for the hard-earned dollars of your customers, you will parcel out happiness. Children will go home and dream of what they saw here and what they did here." (p.59)

Know that King's business, at least in this instance, is not dissimilar.

In short, Joyland is a joy. A gem whatever its genre. And I would be remiss not to note that it bodes very well indeed for Doctor Sleep, which must be the most significant novel the stalwart wordsmith has written since the finale of The Dark Tower saga. If the further adventures of Danny Torrance measure up against the high standard set by this more modest effort, King's constant readers can look forward to another real treat this year.

***

Joyland
by Stephen King

UK & US Publication: July 2013, Hard Case Crime

Buy this book from
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IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Cover Identity | Doctor Sleep Looks Sweet

But seriously, it does.

Doesn't it?

I was already excited to read Doctor Sleep, but now? Now I've ordered a copy of the US edition too, because that... that's cover art!

Though I do wonder whose face I'm supposed to be seeing. Certainly not Danny Torrance's. And I doubt we're looking at Abra Stone either, given that the synopsis says she's only 12 years old.

Actually, hang on. I don't believe I've blogged about the plot before, so here's the blurb doing the rounds right now:

"On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death. 

"Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.” 

"Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil... a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of devoted readers of The Shining and satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon."

I'm still not sure what to make of this sequel—gorgeous as the cover art is, I'm more interested in the text itself—but you can be sure I'll be there from day one, or as near as dammit I can, to tell you whether or not Stephen King's next novel (after Joyland in June) is worth losing sleep over.

The Scotsman Abroad | Smugglivus Some More!

With winter officially here, and Christmas equally near, Smugglivus has begun again over at The Book Smugglers, and however hard we mere mortals might try, nobody does December better than Ana and Thea.

Last year, for my first Smugglivus, I contributed a post entitled Twelve for 2012. This year, it was with immense pleasure that I received a second invite to the site, so I embarked upon a similar but different endeavour, casting my net slightly wider to include forthcoming films and TV series alongside the usual selection of exciting new books. 

Lucky 2013 went live yesterday, and I'd urge you to pop across to The Book Smugglers' blog to read my epic guest post in its entirety. Here's a bit from my first pick:

"There are a couple of authors whose work I practically worship: foremost amongst them, K. J. Parker and China Mieville, both of whom have had new novels released every year for at least the last three. In all probability, there will be books bearing their names in 2013 – for once in my life, I'm hoping each begins a series after so many standalone narratives – but as yet no-one knows what or when or even if these will be. 

"So forgive me, but for my first pick, I’m going to plump for something that actually exists. Guy Gavriel Kay is another firm favourite of mine, right up there alongside the previous pair in the great fantasy food chain, plus he publishes rather more rarely than they. Thus, though there’s been no word on a date for the UK, the release of River of Stars in North America in early April is especially exciting."

I go from the great Guy Gavriel Kay to Stephen King's sequel to The Shining, by way of the new Superman movie and the final season of Starz' Spartacus — and that's hardly the half of it.

You know where to go!

News Flashing | Under the Dome Goes Straight to Series

HBO's Game of Thrones may still be going strong, but with Fringe finishing in the not-too-distant, and my favourite new series from this season - namely Last Resort - dead in the water already, I've been wondering what the year 2013 holds for me in terms of TV.

Well, now I've an inkling. TV Guide is reporting that CBS have made a straight-to-season order of 13 episodes of Under the Dome: a series based on Stephen King's gargantuan 2009 novel of the same name, adapted by Brian K. Vaughan of Lost and Y The Last Man fame, and directed by Niels Arden Oplev, who helmed the original Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Under the Dome is set to hit home theatres sometime this coming Summer, and Simon & Schuster's re-release of the original book in April in the US seems telling; I'd expect to see it on this side of that window. 

Here's a smart-arsed synopsis of the show by TV Guide's Sadie Gennis, now with proper apostrophes:

"The serialized drama, which will be produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, tells the story of a small New England town that becomes sealed off from the world by an over-sized transparent dome — much like in The Simpsons Movie. But instead of running around with Spider Pig, the town's inhabitants are faced with dire and deadly circumstances due to the dome's arrival. Under the Dome will follow the citizens' survival as they try to learn more about the dome and how to get rid of it."

It's unknown as yet, however, whether Under the Dome will be a limited or a continuing series. I'd like to see CBS go limited with it - the premise might be able to sustain itself indefinitely, but the same can't be said about its characters - but no doubt if its first season does decently, Under the Dome will be back for another run in summer 2014 too.

Now that it's actually happening, officially and all, I'm cautiously optimistic about this adaptation. The talent certainly promises a lot. And though I didn't love the book, if the truth be told, as ever with the work of Stephen King, most of its missteps only became evident come the cruddy conclusion... so if Under the Dome goes and goes, that disappointment's a long, long way off, plus the showrunners will have to make such changes to the tale for television that perhaps the end will be better for the stretching of the rest.

It's not likely to be worse, is it?

So, will you all be watching? Or does Under the Dome still have its work cut out convincing you?

Book Review | The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel by Stephen King

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In The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King returns to the rich landscape of Mid-World, the spectacular territory of The Dark Tower fantasy saga that stands as his most beguiling achievement.

Roland Deschain and his ka-tet — Jake, Susannah, Eddie, and Oy, the billy-bumbler — encounter a ferocious storm just after crossing the River Whye on their way to the Outer Baronies. As they shelter from the howling gale, Roland tells his friends not just one strange story but two... and in so doing, casts new light on his own troubled past.

In his early days as a gunslinger, in the guilt-ridden year following his mother’s death, Roland is sent by his father to investigate evidence of a murderous shape-shifter, a “skin-man” preying upon the population around Debaria. Roland takes charge of Bill Streeter, the brave but terrified boy who is the sole surviving witness to the beast’s most recent slaughter. Only a teenager himself, Roland calms the boy and prepares him for the following day’s trials by reciting a story from the Magic Tales of the Eld that his mother often read to him at bedtime. “A person’s never too old for stories,” Roland says to Bill. “Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them.” And indeed, the tale that Roland unfolds, the legend of Tim Stoutheart, is a timeless treasure for all ages, a story that lives for us.

King began the Dark Tower series in 1974; it gained momentum in the 1980s; and he brought it to a thrilling conclusion when the last three novels were published in 2003 and 2004. The Wind Through the Keyhole is sure to fascinate avid fans of The Dark Tower epic. But this novel also stands on its own for all readers, an enchanting and haunting journey to Roland’s world and testimony to the power of Stephen King’s storytelling magic.

***

Almost a decade ago from the time of this writing, The Dark Tower - a saga near and dear to the hearts of many fantasy fans, and at least as meaningful to a multitude of mainstream Stephen King readers who would never think to identify themselves as such - drew to a calamitous close. It marked an end to the entire affair, assuredly - and these days there is worth in that and that alone - but a dissatisfying one, I dare say, courtesy three long novels composed and published within months of one another versus the twenty-odd years their author had occasionally dedicated to unraveling this epic weird western before the awful accident that seems to have defined his career since.

The subsequent rush to wrap things up showed, of course. But on the bright side, at least the thing was finished.

Back then, though, I couldn't quite bring myself to believe that The Dark Tower was actually over... that the series I'd spent my whole reading life looking forward to following through most of the rest of it was suddenly done and dusted, and with what passed for a whimper rather than the thunderous bang I still insist it had earned.

Well: good news, everyone!

That being said, there's bad news too. The Wind Through the Keyhole may motivate a few Johnny-come-lately types into giving The Gunslinger a shot, and perhaps thereafter the remainder of the mostly magnificent series it begins. Old timers, however - which is to say those of us who have been there, done that before (AND ALL WE GOT WAS THIS STUPID SIDEARM!) - are likely to find themselves frustrated by this so-called midquel's essential insignificance.

"Time is a keyhole. [...] We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do - the wind that blows through the keyhole - is the breath of all the living universe." (p.263)

Ostensibly, The Wind Through the Keyhole takes place between Volumes IV and V of The Dark Tower saga, so after Roland's stupefying showdown with Marten Broadcloak in the Emerald City but momentarily before the ka-tet come to Calla Bryn Sturgis and Father Callahan. That, alas, is only important insofar as it represents an empty spot in the mythology where King can stage this postscript of sorts, composed of three stories nestled one within the other within the other.

In the first, whilst traveling along the Path of the Beam, Roland and his oddball posse - including fan-favourite Oy, the billy-bumbler - sense the coming of a Starkblast, and take shelter in an abandoned building to wait out the storm. To help while away the time that night, the wizened old gunslinger of Gilead tells a tale about a tale he was himself told, and once, in his youth, told in turn. This is "The Skin-Man," and though it recalls the extended fiction Peter David has purveyed in Marvel's current comic book cut of The Dark Tower more than anything in the official King canon, it's not half bad for all that. If anything, in (ahem) stark contrast to the narrative within which the other narratives nestle, it's overstuffed... particularly in terms of character.

To his credit, one senses that King is completely cognisant of how very little room he has to maneuver in "The Skin-Man," given that his constant readers know both what comes before it, and after. Thus, there can be no real jeopardy in terms of those folks we know and adore - or not - in advance. In the attempt to redress this balance, however, King goes too far in the other direction, introducing a host of nobodies it's honestly tough to tell apart, far less give a fig for.

It certainly doesn't help that "The Skin-Man" is sliced in half, either. Bifurcated, if you will, by the titular tale, a long novella wherein a woodsman's son, spurred on by two adults - one abusive, the other attractively enigmatic - comes of age after the death of his dear departed father. "The Wind Through the Keyhole" also takes in dark forests, black magics, dragons, SatNav spirits and - to come full circle - a Starkblast, the sister of the very storm you will recall inspired the telling of this old story.

But I've saved the best for last, haven't I? Because finally, not to mention fittingly, there is a reason you need to read The Wind Through the Keyhole, and "The Wind Through the Keyhole" is it. It's a tour de force story: an endearing olde world fable much more ambitious than "The Skin-Man," vastly more satisfying than "Starkblast" or "Storm's Over" - the pointless short with which this midquel concludes - and far better put than anything else in this curiously fragmented collection of loose ends.

Be you a die-hard fan of The Dark Tower or a complete newcomer to King's fiction - assuming such a species of people still exists - "The Wind Through the Keyhole," at least, is well worth the investment. Deeply resonant and sweetly redolent of the good old days of this sadly slightly stymied fantasy saga, it chronicles an author at the top of his game, with some terrific stories yet to tell, and a natural talent for telling them that - at its best, as in this novella - knows no equal.

As to the rest of The Wind Through the Keyhole, though? Well thankee-sai, sincerely... but no thanks.

***

The Wind Through the Keyhole:

A Dark Tower Novel
by Stephen King

UK Publication: April 2012, Hodder & Stoughton
US Publication: April 2012, Scribner

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Comic Book Review | Stephen King's N.

Even before it was published in its original nested text format, Marvel had bought the rights to adapt Stephen King's 'N.' and put the project to a dream-team of comic book and television talent, including Marc Guggenheim - co-creator of the sadly short-lived series Eli Stone - on script duties, with art by the notorious Brian Michael Bendis collaborator Alex Maleev, whose greatest claim to fame has to be his long run on Daredevil.

What resulted - a half-hour motion comic released in 25 miniscule installments to mobile phone owners and certain internet users - was one of the very first instances of a format that's come to some prominence in the years since. I do not say regrettably; I've never been able to see the appeal myself - to me, the motion comic feels like a halfway house between one medium and another, consistently cheap if only intermittently cheerful - but this form of faux-animation has its fans, and that's fine.

In any case, I lost interest in the webisodes quickly. Not because they weren't winningly written, or brilliantly illustrated - to the best of my recollection they were indeed all that - but because I have a moth's memory, and these things were so brief and broken-up I kept forgetting what in God's name was going on. I never revisited the aforementioned motion comic thereafter, but I did see this deliciously twisted tale through eventually -- by way of the originating short story, which was one of the highlights of Stephen King's terrific 2008 collection Just After Sunset.

Whether rendered in words or pictures, or some eldrich accumulation of the pair, 'N.' concerns a journalist, Charlie, who hears from a long-lost friend about the strange suicide of her husband, the psychoanalyst John Bonsaint. Bonsaint, we soon learn, was driven to despair and inevitably death in the selfsame way as his last patient: a man with debilitating OCD, known only as N. as per the doctor's notes. For his part, N. had become obsessed with a circle of standing stones in Ackerman's Field, in rural Motton, Maine, which he was convinced acted as a doorway to another world, from where something wicked - namely the helmet-headed Lovecraftian creature Cthun - will this way come.

Unless someone takes it upon themselves to stop it, that is.

N. does, and dies, and I need not add that his terrible obsession does not end with him. Far from it. Like a virus, it spreads to Bonsaint. Then the doctor's wife catches the bug from her husband, and she, in turn, passes it on to a reporter who becomes fixated on investigating these curious claims. That'd be Charlie, in whose company 'N.' both begins and ends.

Several years later, however, I'd forgotten almost all of the story beats above - a blessing and a curse if ever there was one - so when I heard Marvel had pulled the team behind the webisodes together again, to adapt their own adaptation into a proper comic book, at long last, well... I got my wallet out.

Now I've made some terrible decisions in my time. Once, I voted for Tony Blair, and on another occasion, I bet against Apple, because I couldn't begin to imagine a world without the Walkman. More fool me.

On the other hand, buying into N. again may be one of the best decisions I've made in recent memory, because readers... it's incredible. Without a doubt, Stephen King's N. is the most discomfiting graphic narrative I've encountered since coming back to comic books; it's a real creepshow, chilling and sinister in equal measure.

In the first, that's thanks to Marc Guggenheim: a very fine writer indeed. There's little room in this story for the light touch he's become known for - Stephen King's N. is not sweet but sour - yet herein Guggenheim demonstrates himself equally adept at the darker half of the author's art. Admittedly, some of his script is lifted verbatim from King's short story, but the larger part of it is original, and I would go so far as to say the changes Guggenheim makes add far more to the narrative than they subtract. The pacing is certainly better; the plot, so literal before, comes across more naturally; and the characters - more than names on pages in the originating fiction, but not much more - seem alive at long last.

Nested texts often come across as exercises in look-at-me literary trickery - more about the performance than the performed - and though 'N.' in its first form is an excellent example of said mode of storytelling, I think the beats of its harrowing narrative are rather better served herein than anywhere else. By expanding on the strictly epistolary short with naturalistic flashbacks and a focus on showing instead of telling, Guggenheim fleshes out the bare bones of the original story more to my satisfaction than Stephen King could.

Meanwhile, Alex Maleev. I've never been the biggest fan of his sketchy pencils, but they serve the story so incredibly well in Stephen King's N. that it'd be mean-spirited of me to do anything less than champion Maleev's contribution to this collection's manifest success. Specifically I should applaud his impeccable sense of composition, and his striking use of colour, as illustrated in the images above: of rich reds and warm oranges receding before a palette of clinical blues and greens and greys. It's exemplary stuff.

Though the narrative of 'N.' has gone from nested text to motion comic to graphic novel, Stephen King's N. as adapted by Marc Guggenheim and Alex Maleev is not some admission of defeat. Rather, it is a pitch perfect sequential rendering of a story which remains every bit as thrilling, gripping and magnificently sinister as it was four years ago. In short, I'd still recommend the original short... but I'd recommend this comic book more.

The Scotsman Abroad | Time Turns on a Dime in 11/22/63

Yesterday was A Good Day. I do decree it.

Today should be swell too: after all it's the release date of 11/22/63, the new Stephen King novel. He says it's his final word on time travel. Just so happens it's pretty terrific, too.

But for me - bearing in mind I've had my copy of 11/22/63 for ages - I kinda preferred yesterday. Because yesterday I made my debut on the mighty tor.com. Yesterday my huge review of the new Stephen King hit the one genre blog to rule them all. Yesterday I could hardly have been happier.

Now I pimped the bejesus out of the piece on Twitter yesterday - when else? - but if you missed it, here's a snippet:

I never really had a head for numbers... for dates and times in particular. Rather, language was my forte — you might say from word one — so in school, I found those salient facts I was to absorb from history classes fell away faster than the hours in a day.

In any event, as a Brit, and a Scot, what history I was taught, whether I recall it or not, was the history of Britain, and of Scotland. Which is to say, before now — before immersing myself in the latest tome to come from the undisputed King of pop genre fiction — I couldn’t have told you very much at all about the significance of the 22nd November in the year of our lord 1963; the date the 35th President of the United States of America, the democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was shot dead in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.

Now JFK was not the first American President to be assassinated by some disillusioned so-and-so — in fact he was the fourth... I know these things now — and there would be unsuccessful attempts on the lives of several subsequent holders of the one office to rule them all thereafter, yet it is commonly thought that Kennedy’s death had such far-reaching ramifications as to alter not just the patchwork fabric of the United States, but that of human society entirely. And perhaps it did: borne as it is of the philosophy of chaos, which holds that everything — bar nothing — is uncertain, the butterfly effect may be far from a verifiable fact in and of itself, but science certainly concurs that from each and every action springs an equal and opposite reaction, and the assassination of arguably the most powerful person in the world is no exception to the rule.

11/22/63 begins with a bona fide believer in that theory.

(continue reading)

 

I wouldn't have missed this book for the world. Nor should you.

Will it be a serious contender come Top of the Scots? We'll see. But I'll tell you this for free: I haven't had such fun reading Stephen King this side of the century.

Short Story Corner | Mile 81 by Stephen King

Stephen King has spent what seems a disproportionate amount of time and energy writing about evil cars.

Not, I think, the strongest of concepts in the first place - though there is, admittedly, a certain material menace to these multi-tonne monsters with metallic grilles for grimaces - nor have any of Christine, Under the Dome, From a Buick 8 and so on and so forth convinced me that I'm missing something pivotal. In any event King has systematically mined this minor idea for what little it's worth, and then some.

And then a modicum more! 

And yet. In Mile 81, an exclusive e-book released this September to whet appetites for 11.22.63, the latest tome to come from the undisputed King of pop horror, the man's at it again; albeit on a much more minor scale. Mile 81 is at heart the story of one Pete Simmons, a little fella to his chagrin abandoned by the rapscallions his big brother runs with. Thus on his lonesome one afternoon, and armed only with a magnifying glass which he may or may not use to terrorise ants, Pete steals along to a legendary rest stop he's heard whispers about - signposted as per the title of this short story, and of course abandoned to the hijinx of experimental children - where who knows what adult delights await him?

In fact he finds a half-full bottle of vodka on the road there, and more spread-legged centerfolds pinned to the walls of the rest stop - an eerie Burger King gone to grime - than a ten year old (going on eleven) could ever imagine. Pete takes in his fill of both of these things and promptly falls asleep, sated.

But in the parking lot an old station wagon rolls up, with an unholy appetite fit to put Pete's to shame. Covered in muck and empty, so far as anyone can tell, the car's door creaks open... but no driver steps out.

Mile 81 he is long enough by short story standards, but only that because in place of proferring a single victim to demonstrate the inhuman hunger of this vile vehicle, King devotes one, then another, then a practically a whole family, by which point the point has been so belaboured as to test one's patience. Only then do we return to Pete, who's slept like a baby through all this awfulness. Saying that, Pete has a trick or two up his sleeve, and for once the last of Mile 81's six quick chapters claws an amount of the narrative's early mystery and tension back from the great car showroom in the sky.

Mile 81 is never, however, better than it is during that first chapter, which brings - yes - The Body (aka Stand By Me) to mind, and moments of Joe Hill's Horns. But this short story is also symptomatic of the worst of Stephen King: count among some truly terrible product placement, including tips of the hat to Christine - the film rather than the novel - and the comic book American Vampire, which King is of course also involved in. I could have stomached these metatextual references with little ill will... even the heads-ups to Harry Potter and Doctor Who have their place, I suppose.

But this:

"The beauty of the parked cruiser, at least in Maine State Trooper Jimmy Golding's opinion, was that you didn't really need to do anything [...] All his attention was on the iPad propped against the lower arc of the steering wheel.

"He was playing a Scrabble-like game called Words With Friends, his Internet connection provided by AT&T."

I'll thank you not to do that EVER AGAIN, Stephen King!

I am not much amused, obviously. But Mile 81 does feature an excerpt of 11.22.63, King's forthcoming tome about time travel and the assassination of JFK, and it's actually not half bad. So there's that.

That and the first chapter, which for all my criticisms is legitimately interesting. Would that Mile 81 had remained so...

News Flashing | The Shining 2: Who Knew?

This March, Stephen King made the news. Twice.

The first time, it was to announce his next annual novel. 11.22.63 will be along in early November, and it's another brick of a book; a tome like Under the Dome which seems to be King's spin on The Time Traveller's Wife, and The Lake House.

So the story goes, English teacher Jake Epping is transported "from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life - a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time."

When news of 11.22.63 broke, you didn't even have to listen particularly closely to hear the arching of certain critics' eyebrows, which was, in and of itself, pretty sickening. Me? I'll reserve judgement till I've actually read the book. And you can be sure I'll read it; that's pretty much a given. Short a few years' time out from King's work when I foolishly let the aforementioned critical snobbery that seems to cling to this author like bad gas get the better of me, I've always read Stephen King. Probably I always will.

But here's hoping his next isn't all mouth and no trousers like Under the Dome.

I suppose if it is, there's always his next next novel. Because within the week, King had trumped himself, announcing The Dark Tower: The Wind Through the Keyhole on his official website [wiki]. Set between Wizard and Glass and Wolves of the Calla, the notion of this lost chapter in the life and times of Roland Deschain moves me perhaps less than by all rights it should, for I have read all seven volumes of The Dark Tower... though I fell increasingly out of love with the series as it approached its endgame.

I don't have particularly much to say about The Wind Through the Keyhole, either. So why the post? You must be wondering. Well, here's why.

In short, once King has polished off The Dark Tower 4.5, it's looking pretty bloody likely that Doctor Sleep will be his - wait for it - next next next project. And what is Doctor Sleep?

"Now aged 40, [Danny Torrance] works at a hospice for the terminally ill in upstate New York. He is... an orderly at the hospice, but his real work is to help make death a little easier for the dying patients with his psychic powers – while making a little money on the side by betting on the horses."

So The Shining 2: Shine Harder. Or maybe Son of The Shining - that'd be pretty apt.

What. The. Fuck.


Probably I've made my feelings as regards such a sequel clear as crystal already, but let's make doubly sure: I think it's a terrible idea.


Why? Well, because we're talking about a classic here. A veritable, contemporary genre classic. One of the most important novels King ever wrote. And his track record of late... you know, it hasn't been awful - sure enough he's had worse periods - but it certainly hasn't been great, either. And a sequel to The Shining needs to be truly great for it to stand a chance. For it to do anything other than denigrate our memories of the one and the only, Doctor Sleep needs to be better than anything King has written in decades.


And what are the chances?


Still and all, I can see a sequel to The Shining drawing back a fair few former Stephen King junkies back to the fold. If you're in that position, I wonder: would you welcome such a thing? Or would you prefer that the Grandpa Smurf of supernatural horror left our probably rather idealised imaginings of The Shining well enough alone?