Daniel's Staff Picks
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See what our Floor Manager Daniel is reading... "I dissect time to find the books
that glow so darkly in
the nooks & crannies of the night
& towards that path I
guide my flight."
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Pickin' em up and puttin em' down. Keep walkin'. One foot after another. If you don't wanna buy your ticket then keep walkin'. Don't stop. If you stop your dead. A bullet to the head. I don't know how I would have fared in Stephen King's "The Long Walk". I'd like to think I could hold up under the baking sun, the drenching rain, the swallowing cold empty night, the days without sleep. Maybe I wouldn't go delirious. Maybe I wouldn't drop. Pickin' em up and puttin' em down. Maybe I could make it... KAPOW! Nah, I would have bought my ticket on day one!
What a wild departure from the haunted, dreamy, western tone of book 1, the Gunslinger. King deftly weaves dimensional narratives as he wrangles our unpredictable reluctant heroes in & out of their minds while all the time avoiding the unrelenting pursuit of the “dod-a-chokking” lobstrosities. Yes. You read that right. What the huh? Read & discover, my friend.
I can finally take this book down from my “must read” tower. Why did I ever wait so long? I suppose because I was familiar with the movie that I thought the book would be too similar. Boy, was I wrong. Two very different creatures. If you haven't read this yet please do yourself a big favor and buy it right now, like this very instant, right now! Never Overlook the King!
I enjoyed Revival a lot. It's a supernatural horror story crackling with arcane science & lost faith with shadows of H.P. Lovecraft & Mary Shelley looming heavy. Great characters & an intriguing mystery all the way through to its lightening packed conclusion. If I could think of more electric inspired descriptions I would insert them here. King is like a charged dynamo pumping out the power! We are the lightening rod atop the Empire State Building shocked senseless by King's ec-"static" expressions. Pheww, I'm burned out!
If you can't find time to read the four inch thick bricks of words that is the average king novel, do yourself a favor and read his short stories. These are quick terror filled trips that hit hard and fast. Even the introduction is a worldly wise treatise on horror fiction and why we read it. It’s almost as creepy as the stories that follow. And if you've read Salem’s Lot you will doubly enjoy the lovecraftian origin tale presented here. So many bodies. Never enough sheets.
Though it's published as part of the "Hard Case Crime Line", I don't think it really fits that category. It's a coming of age story set in an amusement where there just happens to be a murder, a ghost and a child with "the sight". It's fast, fun, sad, scary and will have you flipping pages like a fiend to reach the end. Viva la King!
Finders Keeper’s is the 2nd book in the Bill Hodges trilogy & what a kick to the ribs it is. Wow. This was a thrilling read. Don’t you enjoy it when an author came make you root for the bad guy!? He’s so awfully bad too but he’s been through so much… just give him a little peace, things could work out and everyone can go away happy. But no, this is Stephen King after all. The books revisits some of themes of “Misery”, Mr. King's older book about writers & their fans, but takes that passion for the written word even further . I can’t recommend this highly enough. If you love to read & you love reading books about the love of reading & you love a great hard knuckle punch to the gut thriller, then this is the book you need to read.
This is one big book. Holy mackerel! It took me two months reading it off & on between two other book club books. It was definitely worth it & Mr. King knows how to keep the pace moving all the way through. It proves that he doesn’t have to have horror or terror in his novels to tell a compelling suspenseful story with characters you care about & root for. Not that there isn’t some horror in here, it’s just the real world kind. Which makes it all the more ugly.
