Considering the many, many scary things Stephen King has written about, you wouldn't think a story
about an old Indian burial ground that causes things buried there to come back to life would be his most disturbing book. But boy, howdy! Pennywise the Clown and the Man in Black have NOTHING on poor little Gage Creed turning into a bloodthirsty killer toddler.

OK, that last sentence almost makes it sound like a joke, but Pet Sematary is probably King's most disturbing book. When the Creeds moved to rural Maine, they chose a house on a logging road. Most of the time, the road was quiet. But when the trucks come through, they are flying at speeds that are dangerous to anyone who has the bad luck to be in the road. Louis Creed and his family discover this the hard way when their daughter's beloved cat is killed. Louis's friend and long-time area resident Jud takes Louis and the dead cat to the Pet Sematary, where local children have been burying their pets for decades. But Jud doesn't stop in the main cemetery-he continues past it to an old Indian burial ground where things that are buried don't stay dead. Sure enough, the cat comes back, but it is definitely NOT the same as it was when it went into the ground. Louis vows never to use the burial ground again-until his three-year-old son Gage is hit by a truck. But if the cat came back different, what will the burial ground do to a person?

This book is so dark that King didn't even want it published. It was inspired by his family's experiences living in Orono, Maine for a year while King taught a class at the University of Maine, during which his daughter's cat was killed, and his son had a close call with a truck on the road. His wife and his good friend Peter Straub, with whom he wrote The Talisman and Black House, agreed with him that it was too dark for publication, but up against a deadline to complete his contract with Doubleday he turned it in, and it became one of his most popular books. I'm not sure what that says about us as readers-it is so bleak, and there is really no happy ending or moment of redemption.

I guess I must be one of those readers who like it bleak, because I loved this book when I first read it in high school, and I enjoyed it again rereading it now. I remember how much I loved Jud's character and the sweet relationship he has with his wife. He is definitely the moral foundation of the book, and yet he is the one who sets up the situation that leads to so much grief and horror.  I remember the movie version of this book not being great, though there is that scene where Gage takes the scalpel to Jud's Achilles that is just chilling. This story definitely demonstrates its tagline: Sometimes dead is better.

My Year of King, #14-Cycle of the Werewolf

I know I read this when it was first released, but I remembered NOTHING about it. Turns out, that's because it didn't really leave an impression on me, then or now. But considering the strange journey this story took to make it into novel form, that's not really surprising.

Cycle of the Werewolf details a year in the life of Tarker's Mill, a small town in (where else?) Maine. In January, at the full moon, a man is mauled to death by what appears to be a giant animal of some kind. It happens again in February, March, etc...By July, the entire town is terrified. So terrified, they cancel the 4th of July fireworks. Marty Coslaw, a ten-year-old, wheelchair-bound boy, sneaks out to light off some firecrackers his uncle left, and is almost killed by what turns out to be a werewolf. Eventually, Marty discovers the true identity of the killer, and begins sending him anonymous letters, begging him to take his own life to spare the town. In the end, Marty sets himself up as bait in a final showdown.

The book actually began as short vignettes written to accompany a calendar being illustrated by comic-book artist Bernie Wrightson. Not surprisingly, King found the brief nature of the vignette too constricting, and decided to expand the story into a short novel. That initial structure, though, gives the narrative a choppy feeling, since the flow of the plot takes 30 day jumps from chapter to chapter.

By now you'll recognize that a couple of King's traditional motifs are present even in this short, contrived novel. The hero is a child-a boy child, specifically-which comes to be a feature of almost all of King's best loved novels. He also continues to explore the idea of normal, everyday people becoming monsters, though in this book he does it more literally than in others. Because of the nature of the narrative and the brevity of the text, most of King's signature character development is not present in this book, which may be part of why it didn't impact me enough for me to even remember what it was about.

It was turned into the movie "Silver Bullet" in 1985, because by then almost any new King book was likely to be turned into a movie. The film, starring a very young Corey Haim, as well as Gary Busey and Terry O'Quinn, opened to mixed reviews, and became something of a cult classic. I remember seeing it on VHS at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, but even that didn't help burn the story into my brain. I suppose it's an enjoyable enough read in the moment, but it's really a popcorn book; it lacks substance, but is oddly satisfying; it fills you up in the moment, but before long you're hungry again.

My Year of King, #13-Christine

Love at first sight. There's no other way to describe the feeling teenager Arnie Cunningham gets the first time he sees the 1958 red-and-white Plymouth Fury rusting away in the tall grass with a "For Sale" sign in the window. Thus begins the long and terrifying odyssey of a boy and his evil, demonic car known as Christine. The narrator of King's 13th novel Dennis Guilder has a bad feeling about the car from the start, but Arnie quickly becomes unnaturally attached to her. Named Christine by her previous owner, the car begins to exhibit unusual behavior right from the start. Her odometer runs backwards. Her dented bumpers and ripped upholstery begin to repair themselves. Her radio only plays songs from the 1950s. As Christine begins to rise from the rust heap to some semblance of her former glory, Arnie himself begins to change. His teenage acne clears up. He becomes more confident, standing up to his parents for the first time in his life. He starts working for the shady owner of the garage where he "works" on Christine, though he often can't remember making the repairs to her engine or exterior once they appear. He even gets the courage to ask out the new girl, Leigh Cabot, even though you could only describe his previous experience with girls as non-existent. With a new girlfriend, a new car, and new-found strength and maturity, Dennis should have been happy for his friend, but as the year goes on and Arnie becomes more and more obsessed with Christine, Dennis can only be afraid-for Arnie, and for anyone who comes between Christine and her new owner. When the deaths start, Dennis and Leigh try to convince themselves that they are imagining the malevolence they feel whenever they ride in Christine, but eventually they can no longer ignore the evil influence she has on Arnie, who has begun to change in ways that scare them both. But how to destroy the evil that resides in Christine's shiny chrome mirrors and gleaming red-and-white frame?

So far, I've enjoyed most of King's books just as much 30 years later as I did when I first read them, and this one is no exception. It follows some of King's now-familiar themes and motifs; children or teenagers as protagonists, an every day object possessed by something evil, and a weird psychological connection between said object and some poor slob who was just going about his life. This is one of the things that make King's works more than just monster stories. You can't help but have sympathy for Arnie, even as he becomes increasingly hostile and irrational. My only real criticism is that Dennis's character seems a little too good to be true. He's a little too mature, a little too self-assured, and a little too willing to stay friends with someone who was essentially popularity poison. But King does in Christine what King does best; exploring how regular people respond in extraordinary circumstances.

I don't remember loving the movie made from this novel, but then I really haven't liked most of the movies made from King's books, the most recent version of It being the one notable exception. I think that the special effects available at the time just weren't up to the creep-factor that the self-driving, murderous Christine required to be truly terrifying.

My Year of King, #11: Different Seasons

I'm not a huge fan of short stories, as a general rule. I like reading short stories in the context of English classes, or one at a time in magazines, but something about a whole book of short stories just doesn't really do it for me. Unless the author of said collection is Stephen King (or Neil Gaiman, but this isn't a post about him, so...)

Different Seasons is King's second short story collection, and it is clearly his best. Containing four
short (well, that term is relative in this case) stories themed around the seasons, it demonstrates King's mastery of the form. It proves that when pressed, King can, in fact, create amazing fictional worlds with well-developed characters and intricate plots without 1000 pages to work with. Whether you've read Different Seasons or not, you definitely know at least two of the stories in a different form. This is the collection that includes "Rita Heyworth and the Shawshank Redemption", which was shortened to just The Shawshank Redemption when they turned it into an amazing movie starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins. It also includes the story "The Body", which was turned into the very popular movie Stand By Me, starring a young Wil Wheaton, Corey Feldman, Jerry O'Connell, and the gone-too-soon River Phoenix. "Apt Pupil", another story in the collection, is about a teenage boy who uncovers a Nazi war criminal hiding in plain sight in his suburban neighborhood and blackmails him into detailing all of the atrocities he perpetrated. The final story, "The Breathing Method", takes place in a gentleman's club (the old-fashioned kind, not the adult entertainment kind), where an elderly doctor tells a chilling tale of a woman giving birth under gruesome circumstances.

Every story in this collection is a masterpiece of the genre. Emotionally gripping, well-paced, by turns terrifying and heart-warming, together these stories represent the very best of Stephen King. As always, his characters ring true. This is not the first instance of King using children as sympathetic heroes, but "The Body" is the first time he explores the bonds of childhood friendship that he revisits so masterfully in It. Like many of his most terrifying stories, none of the monsters are supernatural, but real people doing terrible things. The only truly supernatural occurrence in the whole book is in "The Breathing Method". Truthfully, King doesn't need the supernatural stuff to create his spectres; his insight into the evil that human beings can do to each other in their greed or lust or fear is enough.

King has several more story collections in his catalog, and I remember some of them being quite good, but none of them rise to the level of Different Seasons. It almost seems a shame that he hit his high point in this genre so early in his career, but I don't care when this collection falls in the timeline of his works; it is a gift to the world that it exists.

My Year of King, #10-The Running Man

I suspect The Running Man is probably the best known of the Bachman books, thanks to the 1987 movie starring the future governor of California. Like The Long Walk, it takes place in a near future where the main form of entertainment is watching people compete in life-or-death competitions for fame and fortune. In the dystopian society of The Running Man, the wealthy and powerful see the poor as vermin who selfishly expect things like jobs and safety and health care (how rude!). To keep them in line, a powerful media company, specializing in reality game shows, gives some of the poor the opportunity to make money by competing in competitions where they must risk embarrassment, injury, or death for the entertainment of the masses. The protagonist, Ben Richards, signs up for the biggest competition of them all, The Running Man, in an effort to save his infant daughter who is gravely ill. As a contestant on this sadistic show, Richards must try to evade the Hunters for as long as possible, all while people on the street are tracking his movements and reporting them back to the Hunters for cash rewards. For every hour he stays alive, he earns what would be a month's salary at most jobs. For every police officer or Hunter he kills, he receives a bonus. If he can last 30 days, he will win a $1 billion prize. No one has ever lasted more than eight days, but Richards hopes he can survive long enough to get his daughter the care she needs.

As books go, this one is pretty dark. There is really nothing to lighten the bleakness of Richards's situation-every time he begins to feel a little bit of hope, he is betrayed, injured, etc...Sadly, considering the book was written over 30 years ago, there are an awful lot of parallels between the casual cruelty of King's future America and the one we are living in right now. So much rhetoric has gone into convincing people that the poor are leeches, lazy welfare queens who just expect hand-outs, that there is little stomach in the country for addressing the systemic causes of poverty. King also describes reality TV before it was really a thing, predicting the rise of shows such as Survivor, Big Brother, and The Amazing Race. Is it so difficult to imagine a more desperate future where the stakes for contestants on these shows rise to the level of life and death? The Running Man also explores the idea that the media will rise to be the greatest power in society, and how it can be manipulated by the wealthy and powerful to their own ends. Considering the number of people who never look up from their smartphones (and I'm not judging-sometimes I'm one of those people), we've already reaches saturation in terms of media consumption. And we've already seen how that media can be manipulated to produce a desired result. Of course, propaganda has been around for a long time, but never before has it had such an easy time reaching the masses, nor has it been as ubiquitous as it is now. We've seen the effects of that biased media manipulation in many ways, not least during the last election cycle, and right up to the present. There are large swaths of people who believe that the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is a true patriot, looking out for the little guy, "draining the swamp" and fighting the "deep state", despite the OVERWHELMING evidence to the contrary. All this because our news sources have become so politically polarized, and because the rise of the internet allows any yahoo with a cause to have a world-wide platform.

Yeah, this was actually a really bad book to read right now. As someone who is already having trouble dealing with the many terrible things this administration is doing, I didn't really need to read something that is so dark and feels so utterly, frighteningly possible. Darn you, Uncle Stevie, for being so prescient. I'd rather your flights of imagination didn't land so close to home.

My Year of King, #9: Night Shift

I have a confession to make-I don't like reading short stories. At least, not entire books of short
stories. If you're going to write an entire book, why not just write a novel? I tend to get bored before I'm even half-way through a book of short stories, no matter how skillful the writing or interesting the subject matter, and over the years I've stopped buying them altogether. (Don't worry, English teacher friends, I actually do like short stories, just not in bulk.)

I have two exceptions to the no-books-of-short-stories rule-Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. I'm not sure whether it's the genre, subject matter, or just my general hero-worship of both of them, but I have no problem getting through their books of stories. And the first book of short stories I ever read was back in the mid 1980s, Stephen King's Night Shift. I remember when it showed up in the house; I must have been 11 or 12. My mother brought home the paperback edition, probably from Crown Books (remember Crown Books?), and I asked her to keep it hidden because the cover freaked.me.out. I hadn't yet read any of King's books-I was not quite old enough yet-but I knew they must be terrifying, because how creepy is that cover. Of course, a couple of years later I read Carrie for the first time, and I've been hooked on King ever since, but my little brother was able to use that cover to creep me out for years afterward.

As a Constant Reader, I've always known that King puts Easter eggs in his novels to reward his fans. What I didn't realize, having read his books mostly in order since the mid- to late-80s, is that sometimes he also foreshadows his later books in short story form. In Night Shift, one of the characters in "Gray Matter" describes a huge spider-like monster in the sewers, which anyone who's read IT will recognize as one of Pennywise's forms. While not specific to any one novel, there are plenty of King staples in these stories-lots of humans behaving monstrously, and monsters behaving like humans. He also provides a prequel of sorts to his novel 'Salem's Lot in the story "Jersalem's Lot", in which some 19th century gentlemen exchange letters about a strange town and a house with something in the walls. This first story collection includes King classics such as "Children of the Corn", which became a not-very-good-movie that ruined the name Malachi forever (and in my experience as a public school teacher, naming your child Malachi guarantees they will act like the devil), and "Trucks", which later became the movie "Maximum Overdrive".

The story that goes along with the creepy picture on the cover, "I Am the Doorway", is actually one of the least scary in the collection, about a man who is infested with alien parasites that are slowly taking over his body and mind, forcing him to do unspeakable things. But that image has NEVER left me. To this day when someone mentions this book, I get a shiver thinking about that darn illustration. King follows up Night Shift with several other short story collections, and I am curious to see whether any of those stories also gave hints to novels that came later.

My Year of King, #8: Roadwork (Richard Bachman)

Change-the only constant in this crazy universe. Sometimes change can be exhilarating, and sometimes it can be catastrophic, but the big ones rarely come without some sort of strong emotions attached. Such was the case for Bart Dawes, protagonist (?) of King's 1981 novel Roadwork, written under his pseudonym of Richard Bachman.

Bart was a loyal husband, and a loyal employee of the laundry service he'd worked for most of his life. The first blow to Bart's sense of the world comes when the laundry is bought by a large conglomerate, reducing him from a person to a number. Then, the state decides they need to build a new highway-right through Bart's neighborhood. This will displace both he and his wife, as well as the laundry he works for. Bart denies the reality of these changes as long as he can, at least consciously. Unconsciously, he plots revenge against the people he sees as responsible for the changes that are upending his life. He is determined to stop the march of progress in its tracks. Slowly, George unravels mentally and emotionally, fighting an ultimately futile battle against corporate and government might.

If you've seen the movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas, you are already familiar with the mood and tone of Roadwork. Bart Dawes is one in a long line of King characters who do terrible things, but whom you can't help feel sorry for (more on that when I write my review of Cujo). Obviously, Dawes is meant to represent the idealized past, a time when loyalty and hard work meant something, and when people were more important than profits. Of course, as anyone who's studied history knows, that idealized past never really existed; at least, not for long, and never for everyone. But Dawes does represent a certain type of middle class white man; men like my father, actually. My dad literally started in the mail-room of ComEd in 1970, and eventually worked his way up to management. He worked for the company for over 30 years, with a pension plan and Cadillac insurance. Admittedly, that sort of job is basically a unicorn in the 21st century. Now, people go from job to job every few years, dragging their 401K with them if they are lucky. But for white men working in skilled manufacturing and lower level management-type jobs 60 years ago, a certain level of stability, respect, and loyalty from their employers were expected. It was these men who were the most affected by, and critical of, the changes in the employment landscape and the social contract that led to where we are today. Suddenly, the world didn't make sense anymore; the basic assumptions under which you've operated your whole life suddenly turn out to be false.

One of the things King likes to do is explore is what happens when you put ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Some, like Jack Torrance and Bart Dawes, slowly go insane. Some, like Stu Redman and Larry Underwood (The Stand), rise to the occasion. While what happened to Bart Dawes was not nearly the terror-filled insanity of Jack Torrance in The Shining, the loss of his identity and his grasp on reality was the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to Bart. And like the factory-workers, coal miners, and steel-workers of the late 20th century who fought and fought to save their dying industries, Bart too is unable to stop the inevitable march of progress that led to his demise. Unfortunately, because Bart Dawes is such an entitled, white male character, longing for the days when he and people like him were on top of the societal food chain (spoiler alert-they still are), I couldn't really relate to him as a character, especially as his desire to keep things from changing led him to basically sacrifice anything and anyone else (including his wife) to his cause.

All of the Bachman books are pretty dark, and this one is no exception. You don't exactly get a happy ending in any of them. Unlike Rage and The Long Walk, which forecast possible futures (sadly, the school shooting has become all-too frequent since Rage was written), Roadwork looks backward, asking us to consider whether all this "progress" is worth the cost.

My Year of King, #7-Firestarter

Chances are pretty good that when you think about Firestarter, what you see in your mind is a very young Drew Barrymore, hair blown back from her tiny face, setting, well, just about everything in her path on fire. That movie, along with E.T., helped propel her to early stardom and created one of the many iconic images of the 1980s. So iconic, in fact, that the Netflix series "Stranger Things" references it, not literally, but through the character of Eleven and the shadowy government agency with nefarious purposes known as Hawkins National Laboratory. As movies made from Stephen King books go, I don't remember Firestarter being too awful, nor do I remember it straying too far from the events of the book, though I will admit it's probably been 20 years since I've seen it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic plot, Firestarter revolves around Andy and Charlie McGee, a father and daughter who are on the run from a secret government agency called The Shop. When he was in college, Andy and his future wife Vicky participated in trials of an experimental hallucinogenic drug that left them with weak psychic and telekinetic powers. Those powers were magnified by a power of a lot in their young daughter, Charlie, who showed signs from a very early age of being able to move things with her mind, and, more frighteningly, set things on fire. This happened most often when she was angry or upset, giving new meaning to the phrase "terrible twos". Andy and Vicky did everything they could to keep her powers, and their own, a secret, but The Shop maintained covert surveillance on all of their past subjects, and when they saw what Charlie could do, they tried to capture her so they could study her with the ultimate goal of creating a super-weapon. Andy, obviously, wasn't really down with this plan, so he took his daughter and ran.

This is not the first time that King has explored the idea of telekinesis, nor the first time he has used a young person as his powerful hero (hello, Carrie!). Charlie is another in a string of children that King uses as protagonists. One of the recurring themes in his work seems to be that the more innocent you are, the more likely you are to have the imagination and bravery to confront evil. In this case, while Charlie is the one that can set things on fire with her mind, the evil is the government, another recurring theme in King's works, first appearing in The Stand. It is not always the main theme, but in many of King's books the least sympathetic characters have something to do with the power structure of the location of the story, whether they be a politician, clergy member, or wealthy citizen.

One of the things I liked about this story, both when I first read it and now, is the relationship between Charlie and her father. He is smart, a teacher (another recurring element in King stories), kind and gentle, and pretty evolved for a man who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite their dire situation, he tries to teach Charlie the difference between right and wrong, even as he sometimes has to tell her to do horrible things to help them evade The Shop. It felt more unusual when I first read it, but even now portraying the father as the primary caregiver of a small child feels is not that common. Unlike Jack Torrance, Andy McGee is able to be truly selfless, doing everything he can to ensure his daughter's safety despite what it means to his own.

The story does feel a bit unbalanced, with long periods of waiting in between action scenes, but oh what action scenes they are! The other characters in the novel; agents from The Shop, mostly; are written with just enough depth for you to understand their motivation, but without any real substance. They could be any shadowy government official from just about any book or movie that contains shadowy government officials. They are fairly shallow, that is, except for John Rainbird, the Native American Viet Nam vet turned assassin, who is tasked with getting Charlie to use her powers. His character is cunning and violent and sociopathic, but with an impressive, if scary, intellect. His main motivation for being an assassin isn't money or revenge or patriotism-his long string of murders are essentially his own twisted research into what you can see of a person's soul if you look in their eyes as they die. He is a truly chilling character, and one of the more subtly written King villains. He definitely adds a quality of menace to an already suspensful story.

My Year of King, #6-The Dead Zone

...or, alternately, "John Smith's Unbelievably Bad Luck". The Dead Zone, one of King's earliest books, may be best known to some readers as the title of a show loosely based on King's work starring 80s teen movie nerd turned hunka hunka hotness Michael Anthony Hall. Like many movies and television shows based on King's work, the writers went pretty far afield from the source material, though the basic premise stayed the same.

In The Dead Zone, Johnny Smith, twenty-something high school teacher and genuinely nice guy, isevent, and sees the terrible future that awaits us all if the man is elected to office. John has a choice to make; ignore his vision, try to get people to believe what he saw is true, or take matters into his own hands.
feeling at the top of the world. He has a job he loves teaching English, and a girlfriend he is quickly falling in love with. He has a rather complicated relationship with his parents, especially his ultra-religious mother, but generally speaking, his life is going in what is, as far as he is concerned, the right direction. Due to a fall he took as a child, which he doesn't even remember, he occasionally gets flashes of insight (read: glimpses of the past and future) from people or objects that he touches. When he and Sarah, his girl, take a late fall visit to a visiting carnival, Johnny gets one of his flashes at the Wheel of Fortune (a bit on the nose, Mr. King), and wins $500, a fortune for a young teacher in 1979 (and frankly, 2018). But this good luck came with a price. On his way home from the carnival, he is in a head-on collision with a drag-racing teenager, and spends the next four years in a coma. When he wakes up, his girlfriend has married someone else, his mother's religiosity has become a mania, and his ability to see the past and future is amped up by a magnitude of a lot. Every time he touches a person or an object, there is a chance that he will see that person's future in his mind. This is a terrible burden, and his use of this ability to save a woman's house from a fire and catch a serial killer gain him notoriety he is neither prepared for nor happy about. But these events pale in comparison when he shakes a politician's hand at a campaign

It is impossible to dislike John Smith. He is a good guy. He's enlightened by 1979 standards. He is a teacher, a good one according to King's description. He treats his girlfriend with gentleness and loving care. And then, this thing happens to him that completely derails his life.  I spent the rest of the book feeling sorry for him in one way or another; he loses his girl, he loses his career, he's hounded by the media, his mother goes insane. This ability that he never asked for and doesn't want destroys any real chance at happiness that he had.

I did feel as though this book is almost three loosely related novellas rather than one cohesive book. The first is the period of Johnny's love affair with Sarah, accident, and recovery. The second, the hunt for the Castle Rock Strangler. The third is his plan and showdown with Greg Stillson, politician extraordinaire and sociopath. It surprised me how quickly the Castle Rock Strangler storyline was resolved. It seemed, from the way the character of Frank Dodd was introduced, that he would be the "Big Bad" that Johnny had to battle. When he was caught so easily, I wondered where the story was going. King is a known political junkie (very liberal, thank you very much), so I'm not really surprised by his decision to make a politician the ultimate evil in the book. He often portrays politicians as vain, venal, and corrupt in his novels. But it seems like the average reader would be more interested in catching serial killers than in stopping sociopathic politicians. But I guess I don't give the average reader enough credit, because this book was a huge best-seller just like almost all of his books are.

This is the first appearance of Sheriff George Bannerman, who works with Johnny to find the Castle Rock Strangler. Bannerman plays a much bigger role in later novel as the sheriff of Castle Rock, until his tragic death a few books from now. This is not the first book to mention Castle Rock, but it is the first book where Castle Rock is an important location in the arc of the story. One of the things I have always appreciated as a Constant Reader of King's work is the way he works references to his other books and stories into the novels and stories that follow. As someone who has read almost all of his work, it feels like a reward every time I understand a reference to some other character, event, or location and know that other readers who aren't as well-versed in King's oevre might not. I suppose that's super nerdy, but in these days when fandoms and nerdgasms are a regular part of pop culture, I'll own that label.

My Year of King #5: The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman)

Dystopian fiction has been big over the last decade or so, especially for young adults. Series like Veronica Roth's Divergent series and Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy have harnessed the anxiety about the future of the human race that seems so prevalent these days and turned it into stories about brave young people defying oppressive authority and overcoming ecological and societal disaster.

When I first read The Long Walk in my teens, I had never heard the term dystopian, but it turns out that experience foreshadowed a future love for the genre. The Long Walk, published under King's pseudonym Richard Bachman, is the story of Raymond Garraty and 99 other teenage boys who are participating in the Long Walk, a competition to see which boy can walk the farthest without stopping. The reward for being the winner of the Long Walk is untold riches, but the consequence for coming in any place but first is death. The boys are followed by men with guns, ready to shoot and kill any walker who stops for longer than two minutes. The boys begin in Maine and walk until there is a winner. The Long Walk is the brainchild of The Major, the dictator of an America that is under totalitarian rule. Ray, being from Maine himself, gets a lot of support and encouragement from the spectators gathered along the walk's route, but will that be enough to give him the strength and stamina he needs to make it to the end.

What makes this short (for King) novel such an interesting read is the way he describes the physical and mental trials the walkers go through. As the Walk goes on through its second and third and fourth day, and the number of walkers gets smaller and smaller, King describes in pretty gruesome detail the effects that non-stop walking can have on the human body. This is not a novel for the squeamish. Each walker responds in their own way to the physical and mental pain and exhaustion, as well as to the increasingly likely event of their own death at the hands of one of the soldiers enforcing the rules of the Walk. A camaraderie forms between many of the walker, who find small ways to support each other, even though their friend's success would mean their own death. It is an interesting study in human nature, and how one author imagines we might behave under cruel and grueling circumstances.

My main criticism of this book, which I don't remember having when I read it the first time 30 years ago, is that though King drops some hints along the way about what has happened to make America into a totalitarian state willing to sacrifice its own teenagers in a bizarre form of ritualized physical competition, we never learn exactly what the purpose of the Long Walk is, who the Major is, how he came to power, or really anything about the state of the world outside of the Walk. From conversations between walkers, we know that it is illegal to speak out against the State, and the punishment is to be killed or "disappeared". We know that there is a militaristic security force that enforces these repressive rules. We know that something must be making these teenage boys desperate enough to be willing to participate in the Long Walk-none of them were conscripted. Each one made the choice to participate without coercion, as far as the reader can tell. I was left with TONS of questions. Readers often bemoan novels with too much exposition, but this one definitely could have used a bit more.

Some folks are also dissatisfied with the ending, I suspect, which leaves the finale of the Walk unresolved. But I am OK with it. I didn't need this story to have the ending tied up in a neat little bow. Unlike some plot-driven novels, I don't actually think the specific events of the novel were as important as the way that the characters reacted to them. All we know for certain is that there was a "winner"-but what that means, or what the long-term effects of being a walker might be on said winner, we will never know.

M-O-O-N Spells My Year of King #4-The Stand, Laws yes!

Clearly, my Year of King is going to turn into my Year or Two or Three of King, but so far my rereading experience has been worth it, so I'll stick with it as long as it takes!

The fourth book to be published by Stephen King (and I mean by the actual person, not by one or the other of his pen names) is one of my favorite books ever, a book that I have on my "Books You Should Read Before You Die" list, the only Stephen King book to give me nightmares. The Stand is, I think, an underrated masterpiece of the 20th century, and should have been on every "best of" list created. I think it is probably underrated because King is considered a "genre writer", and literary snobs love to hate on genre books, especially fantasy and horror (hey, lit snobs, you do know that realistic fiction is also a genre, right?!?). First published in 1978 and clocking in at a whopping 883 pages, it was republished in 1990 in its unabridged form, bringing the page total up to a whopping 1152 pages. This makes it King's longest book; good news for me since his other doorstop novels should feel shorter by comparison. I have read both versions multiple times-I read the original in high school two or three times, and the uncut version in college at least twice-which also makes this my most frequently read King book.

In case you don't know, The Stand is a story of good and evil. After a plague created as a biological weapon escapes the lab, killing 90% of the world's population, the survivors find themselves drawn to one of two places. Those drawn to Hemingford Home, Kansas are hoping to find Mother Abigail, the 108-year-old woman who has shown up in their dreams, and who believes herself to be a prophet of the Lord, sent to defeat the "walking dude". The Walking Dude, Randall Flagg, sets himself up in Las Vegas, and those drawn to him are the violent, the selfish, the deranged, and the greedy. Mother Abigail and our heroes-Larry Underwood, Ralph Brentner, Stuart Redman, Frannie Goldsmith, Nick Andros, Glen Bateman, and Tom Cullen-relocate from Kansas to Boulder, Colorado and start rebuilding society. Flagg's followers, in Las Vegas, soon have the city up and running, and begin to collect as many weapons as they can find. Flagg rules through fear, while Mother Abigail's power comes from love. Flagg is determined to control the entire world. Mother Abigail and her people only want to build a new society that doesn't repeat the mistakes of the last one, and they know that eliminating the threat of Flagg's ambition is the only way they will survive.

Book I details the plague and its immediate aftermath. This is when we are introduced to almost all of the main characters, including Flagg and his future minions. This is the part of the book that gave me nightmares. I don't believe that evil is an actual real force in the world that somehow resides in beings like the devil or Randall Flagg, so that part wasn't scary to me. But, do I believe that humans could create a biological or ecological disaster that could wipe out most of the Earth's human population? You betcha! My nightmares usually took the form of me wandering around the ruins of human settlements, big and small, desperately crying out for someone, anyone, to respond. Honestly, the loneliness of being the last human alive is way more terrifying to me than some evil villain.

Book II is all about the creation of the Boulder Free Zone, the betrayal of a couple of major characters, and the set up for the final showdown. To be honest, this time around I skimmed A LOT of Book II. I remember being interested in the rebuilding society thing the first couple of time I read this book, but this time I really just wanted to get back to the action, already! Truth is, King's original editors were probably correct in their decision to cut those 400 pages, though things like the prologue and Trashcan Man's backstory did add to the plot in important ways. If you decide to read this for the first time, don't worry-after about page 850 things pick up again in a major way.

Book III is the journey of our heroes to confront Flagg, and the final showdown. Without giving too much away let's just say that some characters get much-needed redemption, some characters die tragic deaths, and some characters receive what may well have been divine intervention. Not that it's hard to make me cry, but tears were shed during the last 150 pages, just as they have been every time I've read this book.

This is the first appearance of Randall Flagg, the walking dude, the hardcase, the personification of evil, but it is certainly not the last. Randall Flagg appears, either by mention or as a named character, in many King novels and short stories. Most importantly, he becomes the "man in black" that the gunslinger Roland Deschain chases across the desert in The Dark Tower series. Fans of the show Haven will have seen his name on a newspaper in the opening credits. Whenever Randall Flagg appears, death and destruction are sure to follow. He is the personification of the evil that connects many King books, and constant readers (as King calls those of us who read and reread and read again his books) know that in many ways, King's books are all long chapters in this ultimate story of good and evil that he's been telling for 40 years.

After The Stand, King starts to be more intentional in his addition of "Easter eggs" in his novels and short stories. One of the things I love about reading a King book is finding those mentions of other characters, fictional places, events, and storylines; it feels like a reward for the many, many, MANY pages of King's work I've read over the years.

I am glad to say that I still love this book as much as I ever did (even Book II). King really hits his character-developing stride with this particular cast of characters, especially Harold Lauder and Nadine Cross's characters. They are perfect examples of something King explores in various ways in most of his books-the idea that all of us have good and evil inside of us, and it is this internal struggle that must be won if we want to stay on the side of all that is right and moral in the world. He created one of my very favorite characters of all time, Tom Cullen, the cognitively disabled young man who is really the heart of the story. His worldbuilding is also improving, though the clunkiness of some of Book II proves that he's still got some growing to do in that regard.

The one thing I am noticing most so far rereading these books is how much the language in common use around issues of identity has changed from the 1970s and 80s until now. Tom Cullen is a good example. He is described as "mentally retarded", and the not-so-nice characters call him a "retard". This is not the language we would use any more for people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, but it certainly was the appropriate term when the book was written. Ditto words like "scag", "fag", etc...King always uses the vernacular of the time when writing his characters-it makes them seem more authentic. However, it does mean that some of this dialogue doesn't really stand the test of time. I ended up feeling uncomfortable for reasons that had nothing to do with what was actually happening in the story, even though intellectually I understood why that word was used the way it was. This is not, however, enough to keep me from continuing with this journey through King's oevre. Next up, The Long Walk, a dystopian novel he wrote as Richard Bachman.

My Year of King #4: Rage, by Richard Bachman, AKA Stephen King

There was another school shooting last week. Another loss of life, students and teachers cut down to satisfy some young man's need for power and control. These shootings have become all too regular these days. It seems as though every other day I am getting a news alert that students and teachers are in danger, somewhere in the United States. I say United States, because this is the only developed nation where mass shootings are common enough occurences that eventually they plend together in my mind. Columbine, Newtown, Orlando, Las Vegas, and now Parkland. We're having the usual debates right now about gun control and mental health, and I suspect when the next shooting happens (and it has become depressingly obvious that one will), we'll start all over again. Lather, rinse, repeat, over and over.

(I do have hope that the youth who are standing up and demanding change will be the catalyst for real conversation and real solutions. Political statement: The NRA has got to get out of our political system, our society needs to stop fetishizing guns, and toxic masculinity has to be replaced with a kinder, gentler way to "be a man".)

Other than the weapon of choice (AR-15) and the location (institutions of learning), the school Rage, these types of shootings were almost unheard of. Sadly, this is a novel that feels more relevant today than it probably did when it was originally published. The main character, Charlie Decker, is a kid who just can't catch a break. Living with an abusive father, watching his mother be repressed daily by her husband's machismo and derision, and being the outcast at school has Charlie to be filled with a rage so powerful that he cannot express it with words. After beating up a teacher at school, Charlie is assigned daily counseling sessions with the school psychologist, but nothing helps. So one day, he enters his English classroom, shoots his teacher, and holds the rest of the class hostage for several hours. During that time, you learn more about his life, as well as his classmates.
shooters seem to have something else in common-rage. Regardless of where the rage comes from (abuse, an inflated sense of entitlement, or real mental illness), these young men are filled with a rage so powerful that it overrides their conscience and reason, causing them to do horrific things in order to express it. In 1978, when King (writing as Richard Bachman) wrote

I think that King really tapped into the intense emotions of adolescence with Charlie's character. Teenagers tend to feel all of their emotions more intensely than adults, especially strong emotions like love or anger or shame.Charlie was so up in his own feelings that no consequence, no threat, and no appeal was going to talk him down until he had done what he needed to do. Charlie's actions are dark enough, but what takes this story to another level is that in a Stockholm Syndrome-type of phenomenon, the other students in the room start to express their own secrets, their own rage. It's as though Charlie's extreme action has given them permission to admit things that they would otherwise keep hidden deep down in their private thoughts.

The book is really novella length (149 pages), so it's good that the scope is only a few hours of one day. It does mean, though, that King had to be economical with his character development, and while Charlie is certainly a fully-fleshed out protagonist (antagonist? King is so good at writing characters that are both), the events that have led to this particular act are not as developed, weakening the reader's understanding of the connection between what happened then and what is happening now.

I almost didn't finish reading this book, after the Parkland shooting happened. I wasn't sure I could stand for my mind to continue to occupy that sad, horrified place. But I'm glad I did. It is still good storytelling, and the themes should not be something we forget-that our young people are vulnerable to rage and despair, and we must provide them with the tools they need to manage their feelings and survive their childhoods.

My Year of King, 'Salem's Lot (1975)

Eek! It's already the beginning of February and I am only on #2 of the many books of Stephen King that I want to re-read this year. I'm going to have to up my reading game if I hope to finish.

The second King book to come out was 'Salem's Lot, published in 1975. I first read it as a teenager in the 80s, and I remember being pretty terrified by the story. Reading it as an adult 30 years later, however, I found myself mildly disappointed that it didn't live up to my memory of it (a phenomenon I expect will encounter again as I revisit the King books I read as a young person). Don't get me wrong-'Salem's Lot is still an enjoyable, worthwhile read. It's just not quite as mind-blowingly scary to me as it once was.

That might have something to do with the subject-vampires. When King wrote 'Salem's Lot, vampire stories were mostly found in old-time horror films and pulp fiction. However, since the pop culture juggernaut that was the Twilight series, vampires have steadily been in books, movies, and television shows, in incarnations both classic and completely new (sparkly? really?). I think I've reached vampire overload at this point. King's vampires are decidedly of the classic variety. A super old vampire and his human familiar set up shop in a small Maine town, and slowly turn almost all of the people who live there into almost-mindless killing machines. All of the old vampire foils are at play-holy water, crucifixes, sunlight, etc...culminating in some fairly gross scenes involved stakes to the heart. As a vampire story, 'Salem's Lot is a perfectly respectable member of the genre, but it's really an updated, slightly different version of Dracula. I found myself glad that King generally stays away from movie monsters after this novel (with a few exceptions), and focuses on how evil doesn't always look like evil, and regular people can be monsters. The monsters King invents are way better than the old-fashioned kind.

There are definitely elements of the novel that become staples of King's work, and so far that's been the most interesting thing about this re-reading exercise for me. Reading his works in order is allowing me to trace the development of certain themes and literary devices he uses consistently in his books. 'Salem's Lot is the first place that King explores the idea that physical places, especially houses, soak up the psychic and emotional energy that is expended inside their walls. These houses (or hotels; The Shining is up next for me) become characters in their own right, emanating darkness and evil even when empty of (physical) inhabitants. The Marsten House looms over the town of 'Salem's Lot, sending off such powerful "here there be monsters" vibe that even the local teenagers avoid it most of the time.

King continues an idea that he started in Carrie, and which he probably develops most masterfully in the book It and the story "The Body"; namely, the idea that children are somehow inherently able to believe and confront things that the grown-up mind has trouble processing. His basic premise seems to be that children have not yet let go of the imagination and magical thinking that comes along with being a child, and therefore they can see, hear, feel, and do things that adults sometimes can't. In this case, the child is Mark Petrie, and while he eventually teams up with a group of grown-ups, he is the only character in the book who immediately understands the danger of the people in town who've gone missing.

"Salem's Lot is also King's first attempt at wholesale world building. Unlike sci-fi or fantasy writers, his creations are almost always normal, average small towns, the best known of which is the fictional Castle Rock. Much like the way that houses and other buildings become characters in their own right, the towns King creates, and the people who inhabit them, become as integral to the story as the main characters. I wouldn't say this first attempt is clumsy-King's writing is never that. I will say that I think he gets more efficient at it in later books. I think that 'Salem's Lot probably could have been about 100 pages shorter had King found a way to narrow his focus when it came to describing the town and its people. There are townspeople he spends a few paragraphs or pages on who end up not being that important to either the development of the town as a character or the plot, and he occasionally committed that author's sin of using more words that he needed to get the point across (which I will give him a pass on, because I also write sentences that are long and complex to get a point across that could probably have been stated more succinctly, like this one!). By the time King gets to some of his later books, he's got the world-making part down to an art, and his characterizations are some of the best in contemporary literature, in my opinion.

Given it was the 1970s, I suppose I get it, but his female characters (and really, there's only two who are truly important to the plot) are less developed as his male characters, and both of them meet tragic ends. That's not necessarily a criticism in itself, because pretty much everyone but the main characters Ben (a writer, another common element among King's protagonists) and Mark meet tragic ends, including a few babies, which had to seem almost sacreligious to readers in the 1970s, but still. His female characters in later books have more agency and are much better developed, and since Carrie was such a kick-ass, powerful character, I'm not too mad at him for the way he wrote Susan and Eva in 'Salem's Lot.

I changed my Goodreads review of this one from four to three stars when I finished it, but three stars means this is still worth the read. And now, on to The Shining. Which I hope, hope, hope I still think is creepy and moody and terrifying by the time I am done.

My Year of King: Carrie, 1974

Finally! I started re-collecting King's books at the end of 2017 in preparation for my 2018 goal to re-read all of King's books, and there they sat, taunting me, until the new year. I am so excited to start this journey into the world of Stephen King. I've read his books regularly since I was a teenager, and I am really curious to see how my reaction to his stories has changed as I have moved from adolescence into middle age.

Because I am reading the books in the order they were published, Carrie was up first. This was also the first King book I ever read, so we've come full circle. Going into it, I wondered if I would still find it as engaging as I did when I was 13, or whether the intervening years would change my opinion. If I started reading King today, would I still love his books as much as I do?

I am relieved to report that I enjoyed Carrie as thoroughly in 2018 as I did in 1983. While I now recognize that it reads more like a young adult novel in a lot of ways than I did when I was an actual young adult, it still captured my interest as an adult reader, and kept me hooked even though I already knew how the story would come out.

The story, for those of you who have managed to avoid both the book and the two movies based on it in the last 40 years, is about a teenage girl named Carrie. Carrie lives with her religious fanatic mother, a woman who is so hateful and cruel it almost defies belief. Because her mother won't allow her to have friends, dress like the other girls, or go out to school events, Carrie is an outcast, ostracized and bullied everywhere she goes. After an especially heinous bullying incident in the girl's locker room (scene of many cruel incidents, both fictional and real), Carrie discovers that she has an amazing power-she can move objects with her mind. More drama ensues both at home and at school, culminating in the worst.prom.ever.

Carrie introduces us to a few stylistic characteristics that will become well-known to regular King readers (or Constant Readers, as he called us). Throughout the book, he lets you know that folks are going to die, and when. He creates characters that feel like real people, though they are less nuanced than his later characters. One of the things I love about King is how even his villains are often sympathetic, or at least conflicted about the evil they do. The good guys and bad guys in Carrie are pretty one-dimensional in that respect. The bad guys appear to have no redeeming qualities, and even when Carrie is literally destroying her entire town you still feel sorry for her. But there are glimpses into the types of characters he will write later, namely Sue and Tommy, the "it" couple who play such a large role in getting Carrie to that fateful prom.

Overall, re-reading Carrie has got me super stoked for book number two, 'Salem's Lot. I remember enjoying it, but that was before the Twilight phenomenon caused the literary world to be Carrie it will almost be like reading it for the first time all over again.
oversaturated with vampire stories. I remember very few specifics about the plot of this story, so unlike

New Year, New Look, New Goal

If my blogs were children, I'd be arrested for neglect. Over the last couple of years, I just have not had the time, or so I told myself, to keep up with my blogging. I was reading just as much as I always had, but I just couldn't find the motivation to keep up with my book reviews. I've always enjoyed it, but a new job and new family responsibilities left me with very little emotional or physical capital at the end of the day. Since I still like to eat and have a roof over my head, the things that had to go were the things unrelated to either of my jobs-playing music and keeping up with my blogs.

BUT, new year, new goal! Recently a friend asked me for a book recommendation, and in the course of our conversation she mentioned how she used to check my blog first, and she was disappointed I had stopped writing. I realized I was disappointed, too. I missed having a place to write about the books I've read. I enjoyed knowing that people were reading what I wrote, and finding new books to love-or new books to avoid! I missed taking the time to read other book blogs, something I stopped doing when I stopped writing. So, it's time to get back in the literary saddle! No more excuses, I'm going to set a blogging schedule and stick with it!

Since I've got a new outlook on blogging, I figured I needed a new look on my blog! Thank the BTemplates, and I couldn't be happier with the design. If I manage to stick with my goal
Universe for people who create free Blogger templates. I'm not quite to the point in my new blogging adventure that I want to pay for a background. The template I am using came from
and build my readership back up, I will splurge on a custom design!

And, of course, a new year brings a new reading goal. This year I've decided to re-read all (well almost all) of Stephen King's books, including the short story collections, in the order in which they were published. I am skipping the Dark Tower books, because that is a 3800-page commitment all by itself, and also the Bill Hodges series because I just finished it. I haven't decided yet about Doctor Sleep, Revival, or Joyland since I've read all of those in the last three years, but we'll see.

I already finished Carrie, the first book he ever published, so expect a post on that soon. I will also still be reading lots of young adult novels for school, and whatever books my book club picks, so it won't be all King all the time.If King isn't your thing, you can still check here for my thoughts on whatever non-King books strike my fancy.