Ethan > Recent Status Updates

This book has serious pacing issues. Crazy cop going around killing people, some tension building, and then King gathers the characters up in an old movie theater and they've just been telling stories for the past 70 pages. Totally killed the momentum and it's so boring. And why are like half of all Stephen King characters alcoholics who are in AA? I know he used to drink himself, but it gets old after so many books.

Once you'd been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on publishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel.

If only 1996 Stephen King knew he was referring to his future self here...😔

Desperation, Nevada

"Dweem Fwoatah" 🚘

Tak

Is Richard Bachman really just Gonzo King, like Gonzo Nicolas Cage? This book is pure craziness. Is Gonzo King the best King? Or is that Cocaine King? Either is better than the hokey, bloated, Holly Gibney-obsessed, cringe-worthy shell writing books under the name Stephen King over the past two decades or so. For the good of Mankind and to save all the trees killed for King's crappy modern books, BRING BACK BACHMAN!

Zadie Smith kind of reminds me of Trump. Random exclamation marks at the end of her prose. Not in dialogue, at the ends of actual prose sentences. Maybe it's her way of trying to express passion, but in a book so incredibly boring, such attempts just seem weird and out of place.

Interrogation

I adjusted my pace to keep a half step ahead of my partner. I didn't want her thinking she was my equal. This was my case.

The Nechung Idol

Underwater explosions

I think I've had this one figured out since about page 30; Stine isn't exactly great at throwing the reader off.

Ethan came toddling into the room. He was about four, chubby, roundfaced, and very blond. "Who are they?", he asked his mom, pointing a water pistol at the new arrivals.

Hey! That doesn't describe me at all. And the only plastic pistol I own is an old Nerf gun. 🔫 😤

🚮

A fight to the death

Soooo...this book is terrible. If I hadn't spent like $40 bucks on my hardcover copy years ago I would have DNF'd by now. There is a villain in here named "Mr. Ha-Ha", which really tells you all you need to know.

This one is pretty boring so far and a classic example of the extra bloat in King's novels: 120 pages so far of a teenager just taking care of an injured elderly man. Giving him his pills, helping him into bed, feeding his dog. Many of these things repeated multiple times. Why does this need to be there? It simply doesn't. Also King calling the internet "the Net" dates him considerably and makes me cringe slightly.

A growing sense of unease

The Optimen

Aaaaaand the phone zombies are levitating now... 😐

😢

Ok...the pseudo-zombies are all gathered in a soccer field lying down and may be "rebooting" now...I'm getting a whiff this may be heading into "Terrible Stephen King Second Half" territory now...

This isn't anywhere near as terrible as I've been led to believe over the years. But King DOES have a tendency to fall apart in the second half. Interested to see where this one goes, but it's not bad so far!

I have to say, I don't really "get" this book. The...what do I call them, I don't watch reality TV...contestants?...participants?...of the compound keep saying how they came to the compound to have a good time, but these people are miserable and life on the compound is very cutthroat and seems like a living hell. Maybe that's part of the point of this book but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me regardless.

Dreamers

Green fog

Tabloid haystacks squat. Emptied trash cans skid to anchor corners. Shopkeepers retract metal gates that repel burglars from merchandise unworthy of theft. All this metal grinding, this is the machine of morning reaching out through cogs and gears to claim and wake us.