Alastor Blake > Recent Status Updates

Story 1: “Room 24” by Caroline Kepnes.

“Abel heard a siren and remembered the virus.”

“Remembered the virus” is a good summary of the relation of this story to The Stand, but it’s a well-written, unnerving story, and I love an unreliable narrator. I also enjoy stories that are only obliquely connected to another work’s plot, in how those secondary stories fill out the main story’s world.

Revisiting this via audiobook. I really liked it when I first read it.

On my first audiobook listen, this stood out as one of my favorite modern (post-2000) King books. (To be fair, so many of his modern books are fantastic, so this isn’t feint praise.) Revisiting it now.

I’m not the biggest fan of Salem’s Lot largely because the main character & romance aspect get on my nerves, but there’s a lot of incredible spooky scene work in here. And the best parts are the scenes of town life! Great characters and a strong beginning to King’s interest in the darkness lurking within small towns.

“All apples are special…”

This book is great, but woo boy does it feel too much like real life—bad guys with power getting away with terrible things, corrupt leaders and their lackeys pointing fingers at others for the crimes they commit…

Tim Curry reading the cosmic horror story “Crouch End” is simply magical.

There’s so much awful information in this book already. One of many deceptive marketing tactics that leapt out as most sinister was the creation by Purdue Pharma of the concept of “pseudoaddiction,” in which opioid addicted patients are said to display behaviors of addicts because they are actually still in pain and are seeking more drugs to ease that pain, not because they’ve become physically addicted…