11/22/63 Enhanced Edition by Stephen King

Rating: WARTY!

Enhanced? You meean it has yet more extraneous character history even than the original one did? What, do we go back eight generations of family now instead of four when a character is first described? It's an even bigger doorstop? Even more trees were sacrificed for the print edition? "A man traveling back in time to prevent JFK’s assassination unleashes unexpected consequences" No, they're entirely expected. Apparently only the idiot book blurb writer thinks they were unexpected. Yawn.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Rating: WARTY!

I don't think Ive ever had a month quite as bad as this for finding one read after another to be disappointing. Only one out of sixteen reads so far?! To be fair a lot of those were audiobooks in which I take a lot more risk than I do with other formats, so I tend to see more failures there than anywhere. This one was no better. I'm expecting things to pick up int eh next few reviews, however, so hang in there!

I've long given up on Stephen King, but a friend recommended this one and I decided to try it since it was so short (at least as compared with King's standard overblown, massively-bloated tomes), but once again he failed to move me. This was an audiobook read quite delightfully by Anne Heche as it happens. I'm a fan of hers, but even she could not overcome the improbable material. The main character is nine years old, but she's written as a far more mature character than that and it simply didn't ring true, so I lost suspension of disbelief right from the off. Worse: the story was rambling and uninteresting, and overcooked with artificial ingredients that will make you sick. It did me anyway.

The story is that Trisha gets lost on the Appalachian trail when she wanders off the track to take a leak. Her lousy mom is so busy childishly arguing with her petulant older brother that neither of them notices that she's gone. Trisha inevitably gets lost, and instead of working logically (as her far too mature brain ought to have) she makes things ever worse for herself by wandering further and further from the track, never once considering backtracking, until she blunders accidentally back onto a main road where a hunter fortunately doesn't shoot her but gets her to safety. And in one of the most sickly endings ever, estranged mom and dad magically get back together again. Barf.

This could have been a decent story in better hands, but it's all been done before. King could have chosen to write it a little differently, but you know he can't write a story that doesn't involve bogey men, so there is one chasing Trisha that's entirely a product of her own mind, which admittedly isn't absurdly mature, but it is tiresomely childish. We're expected to believe that her vast passion for baseball (not actually hers as it happens, but King's - yawn) is what saves her and keeps her going. Ho hum.

It's a tedious, tedious, asinine, and thoroughly unrealistic story that you know is coming from the brain of a man in his fifties which isn;t remotely like the brain of a nine-year-old girl. I'd expect a story like this from a first time amateur who was out of good ideas for a novel, but not from a seasoned writer. I'd even go so far as to say if this had been submitted as a first novel by an unknown, it would, rightly or wrongly, never have been published.

After the first sixth of the novel I began skimming and it didn't improve. This one had these utterly pointless and asinine drum and cymbal riffs at the start of each chapter for no evident reason. Why audiobook publishers feel an utterly braindead need to inject music into a story I have no idea, but it pisses me off. The author never wrote this music! What is it doing here? I hate it when they add music to novels which the author never had anything to do with. If an author of King's power and influence cannot keep it out of one of his novels, then what hope is there for any of us except to avoid Big Publishing™ like the plague?

If the sound disaffects had been baseball calls and cheers or something like that, I could have at least understood it even as I detested it, but drum riffs? cowbells? Cymbal zings? It made zero sense to me. Please, audiobook publishers, get a clue! It's about the writer and what they've written, not about your dumbass audiobook producer's frustration with his or her complete lack of musical talent. It's an insult to try to tart up a good story with irritating bells and whistles, and it makes a tiresome story like this one so much more obnoxious. In the end it was one more Big Fail by Big Publishing™ and I flatly refuse to recommend this disaster.

The Shining by Stephen King

Title: The Shining
Author/Editor: Stephen King
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
Rating: WORTHY!

It’s time for a pair of creepies for Halloween! Stephen King's third published novel is the only one of his that I really like. I've read several and never found another one which matches this one. My problem with King is that he reached a point shortly after this novel where he couldn't tell a story without telling the entire history of every character in the story, and it’s quite simply b-o-r-i-n-g! This novel wasn't. It was a bit long, but it had enough weirdness and action in it to keep it cooking beautifully. The way the hotel slowly absorbs King like a paper towel sucking up spilled tomato juice is delicious.

The first time I ever read this was when I was working night shift at a place where I wasn't required to do a whole heck of a lot besides keep an eye on things, so it was a great time and place to read it, too.

The novel begins with Jack Torrance, who has anger management issues and who is living on the edge, glad to finally get a job where he can get paid and also write. Which of us doesn’t dream of that?! The problem is that the job is caretaking the Overlook Hotel, which is a great place to stay in the summer, but which is totally cut off in the Colorado Rockies in winter, with no hope for outside help if anything goes wrong. Yeah - this is Stephen King, so you know everything is going to go wrong.

So while it begins with Jack (yeah, I know, yet another novel with a character named Jack. Just grin and bear it. Sooner or later writers are going to tire of that name, and then we'll get some respite.), it’s really about his young son Danny. Danny is the one who shines - meaning, in King's bizarre and obscure lexicon, that he has telepathic and clairvoyant powers and sees spirits which, frankly, terrify him. The third character is Jack's wife, Wendy.

Finally there's Dick Hallorann, the chef at the Overlook, who's headed for warmer climes for the winter. He discovers that Danny shines, and connects with him - telling him that if there's any trouble, Danny should just mentally call him, and he would come and help. Dick warns Danny not to go into a certain room, and to just ignore any spirits he might see here.

Oh, there is one other character: Delbert Grady, a former caretaker who went beyond "lost it" one winter and killed his entire family, including himself. He never actually left the hotel, however, and now Danny is here, he's working inadvertently as a sort of amplifier for the evil that lurks within it’s very fabric and structure.

The hotel wants to absorb Danny, but it can’t get him, so it turns attention upon the weakest link: Jack. Jack slowly starts losing it, especially when he has a fight with his wife and subsequently discovers that the hotel bar is fully stocked where it had previously been empty. Or it just his imagination?

The more he's sucked in by the oppressive and all-pervasive evil atmosphere of the hotel, the more he feels pressure to do to his own family what Grady did to his. It’s not long before all-out hostilities break-out, with Jack getting locked in a pantry because he's downright dangerous, and Wendy locking herself in a room into which Jack tries to break before she cuts him with a knife.

It’s at this point, where the whole hotel is coming alive and the creepiness factor is rapidly being dialed to eleven, that Danny lets out a massive mental shout for Dick, who gets it so hard that he almost collapses. He immediately sets off for the Overlook, not knowing how he will ever get there, but determined to do so.

One thing Jack neglects in his single-minded pursuit of Danny - so that he can turn him over to the hotel, is the hotel boiler, which 'creeps', and which will explode if not frequently attended to. This is what eventually takes out Jack, as Wendy and Danny escape with Dick.

This novel is nothing short of brilliant and I highly recommend it if by chance you haven't read it yet.