strange and random happenstance

The Last Word by Taylor Adams
Published by: William Morrow
Publication Date: April 25th, 2023
Format: Hardcover, 352 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

In December the Strand is deserted. Which is exactly how Emma likes it. After what happened she needed a clean break. A place to forget what came before and see if she can face what happens next. Which is a big if. The backpack by the door filled with rocks is a reminder of how it might all end. She often finds herself standing in the ocean wondering how she got there and if next time might be the point of no return. She took a job house sitting for a local, Jules, in order to escape her life and humanity. Which has worked out quite well. Only Jules has her phone number and her nearest neighbor Deek is thankfully willing to keep their relationship strictly relegated to games of hangman on white boards placed in their windows. Emma spends her days walking her beloved dog Laika and devouring bargain priced murder mysteries on her Kindle. The quality of the story doesn't even matter, she just needs it to be different from her life, her pain. Then one day Deek recommends a book, Murder Mountain by H.G. Kane. The book has an interesting conceit in that it's told through the eyes of the killer but other than that it might just be the worst book that Emma has ever read. Which leads her to write a review. A vicious one star ode to a book that should be avoided at all costs. She almost doesn't post it. It would have been better for her if she hadn't. Because the author asks her to take it down. Then demands it. She writes him an email and his response is unhinged, but also worrying. Could he know who she is? But that would be more ludicrous than the plot of his book. But what if his books aren't fiction? What if he writes from the perspective of the killer because he is a killer? Sounds in the house start to put Emma on edge. And there are odd smells too. The figure watching her sleep had to be a dream. Then Laika finds some food on the beach with fishhooks in it. Thankfully Emma gets it away from Laika without any damage. Then a masked individual appears on the doorbell camera. Jules is worried for Emma's safety and tells her she'll send her a stun gun. Emma thinks this is blowing things way out of proportion. But Emma will soon learn that nothing is being blown out of proportion. Her life is on the line. The question is, will she fight for it?

Perhaps I gave this book an extra star due to its conceit and possible consequences. The clever conceit of The Last Word, almost a reverse Misery, should make any online reviewer question what they're putting out in the world. But a clever conceit sadly isn't not enough to save it from feeling bloated. This book overstays its welcome. It would have made a great novella. Because the way successful horror is structured you usually get an initial introduction to the killer and their first victim and move on to the final girl and her story. Taylor Adams doesn't realize that Emma Carpenter isn't the final girl. She's the girl who's supposed to be murdered in the first few pages. She is the Drew Barrymore of this tale and nothing more. So trying to make her something more is painful. And speaking of Scream, this book could have done with a lot more knowing humor, a little camp. It's written so formally that a conceit that could have been camp comes across as forced. Taylor Adams is forcing us to accept the absurdity of the situation without fully embracing it himself with a few exceptions. This is painfully obvious with the parallel narration about H.G. Kane. Kane is a creepy incel. Having to read about his self-perceived "genius" is like being forced to listen to someone spouting Trumpisms. "This is the best book in the world, this book has more words than any book ever, can you believe I wrote that many words? 110,00 to be precise! I'm a creator while all Emma does is destroy and denigrate with her hurtful words, could she write that many words? No she could not." This writing style while obviously a parody of all the Trumpers out there after the initial laugh just enraged me. I don't want to spend a minute with this character let alone an entire book. Thinking on it now I'm reminded of when The Late Show with Stephen Colbert released the book Whose Boat Is This Boat?: Comments That Don't Help in the Aftermath of a Hurricane composed entirely of things our previous President said. It was supposedly satire for charity, but it was painful to read such stupidity. I just can't with people like Trump and H.G. Kane. Which is why this book needed more camp, more social commentary on this horrible human. H.G. Kane doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as Michael Myers. He just needs to go away or be mercilessly sqwered. Because the balance as it exists in this book now just doesn't work. There's no one I liked other than the dog, and all the twists were so obvious. I mean like, hit my head against the wall obvious. If people couldn't get what was going on perhaps you need to go take that "man, woman, person, TV, camera" mental cognitive assessment.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Book Review, Drew Barrymore, Final Girl, For the Love of Book Clubs, H.G. Kane, House Sitting, Incels, Kindle, Laika, Misery, Murder Mountain, Scream, Taylor Adams, The Last Word, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Castle Rock might just be the most interesting adaptation out there because for it's inspiration it's not taking just one Stephen King book but a whole heck of a lot of them and mashing them up in new and unique ways. Besides all the stunt casting of actors who have previously been in King adaptations from Sissy Spacek to Tim Robbins to Bill Skarsgard, the references to King's works are just staggering, from The Shinning to Needful Things to Cujo, seriously, just google "Easter Eggs Castle Rock" and you're going to get so many lists you'll be reading for days. Why I was especially excited for season two was because Misery was coming to Castle Rock. Now of all Stephen King's books that I've read for some reason Misery has always been a favorite of mine. Could it be because I watched the movie and loved it at a young age? Probably. Could it be because it's one of the first Stephen King books I read? Most definitely! Could it also have to do with seeing a stage adaptation one of my friends was working on when they used a blowtorch instead of a hammer? Oh yes! I love me some real fire on stage! So while this season drew maybe more heavily on 'Salem's Lot then from Misery, I was totally just judging it on the merits of Misery, and they succeeded wonderfully. The success was all down to Lizzy Caplan. I've been a fan of hers ever since Party Down, which means I know her for her comedic chops, and wasn't sure if she could deliver dramatically as Annie Wilkes. Oh, she was perfection. She was a young Kathy Bates while somehow making it her own. Also the background they wrote for the character? Perfection. If future seasons are this good I hope we get many, many more. And not just because I want more answers. Though that would be nice too.    

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Adaptation, And the Emmy Goes To, Annie Wilkes, Bill Skarsgard, Castle Rock, Cujo, Easter Eggs, Kathy Bates, Lizzy Caplan, Misery, Needful Things, Party Down, Sissy Spacek, Stephen King, The Shining, Tim Robbins

N0S4A2 by Joe Hill
Published by: William Morrow Paperbacks
Publication Date: October 15th, 2013
Format: Paperback, 720 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

When Victoria McQueen was eight she crossed a bridge between Lost and Found. Her family had just returned home to Haverhill, Massachusetts from their summer vacation and her parents were fighting. Again. Her mother couldn't fight her bracelet with the butterfly on it and worried she had left it back at the Lake. Vic, unable to take the fighting, jumps on her bike, a Raleigh Tuff Burner, and takes to the trails behind her house. In a fit of pique she decides to go to the Shorter Way Bridge. She's been forbidden to go near the derelict and condemned structure but today she sees the light on the other side and just rides past the chain blocking the entrance. She expected to come out on the other side of the river, instead she comes out in an alley behind Terry's Primo Subs in New Hampshire. This is the restaurant where they always stop on the way home from the Lake. And there, behind the counter, they have her mother's bracelet. By this point Vic is feeling sick. She barely makes it home across the bridge and takes to her bed. When she awakes she has no memory of this journey. She will repeat this trip many times over the years finding that which was lost on the other side of the Shorter Way Bridge only to forget. On one of her journeys she meets Maggie. Maggie has been waiting for Vic because she also has powers. They are both able to poke a hole in reality, but not without a price.

Though there's a bigger danger out there on the inscapes than the price they pay for admission. There's the Wraith. Maggie begs now thirteen year old Victoria to promise to never go looking for the old man and the car. Charles Talent Manx "saves" kids by spiriting them off to "Christmasland" in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith with the vanity plates reading NOS4A2, a private joke. At the age of seventeen Vic can now barely ride her Tuff Burner and is spoiling for a fight and has spent years hearing about kids going missing, kids she is sure Manx has taken. She goes looking for trouble and ends up just where Maggie never wanted her to go, the Sleigh House. Manx's home in this realm is in the mountains of Colorado surrounded by pine trees with Christmas ornaments hanging from every branch. She barely escapes with her life, being saved by a young boy on a motorcycle. Lou is her hero and Manx goes off to prison to rot. Lou and Vic make a life together. They have a son, Wayne, and Vic becomes a rather successful children's book author with her Search Engine series. But the children of Christmasland won't let her get away with what she did to Manx. They reach out to her and listen as her sanity falters. As she's trying to repair the years of damage she has wrought on those she loves Manx escapes and takes Wayne for a ride in the Wraith. Vic's life is in free fall and she knows that the time has come to end Manx and Christmasland once and for all.

I picked up this book over the holidays because I think horror kind of lends itself to that time of year and with a place called Christmasland how could it not put me in the right frame of mind for Christmas and New Year's? Here's the thing though, this book is more a "Christmas in July" book taking pains to contrast the snowy environs of Christmasland with the sweltering heat of a summer day. Therefore it felt off reading it around Christmas. This should be read when the air conditioning is on high and the glare of the sun is so bright you can't bear to look at the heat haze over the pavement. When you decide to watch Fargo because watching that movie during the winter just depresses you but in the summer it's the perfect meteorological pick-me-up. The extra irony in this is that if there's one author I view as the go-to author for behemoth beach reads it's Joe Hill's father, Stephen King. Of all the Stephen King books I've devoured over the summer months, from The Shining to Under the Dome, I can think of only one of his books I've read during the winter months, and that's Misery. Therefore it seems right to me that N0S4A2 should be a summer read. Of course a little belatedly. Plus, it ties into the whole horrific concept of "Christmas in July." Christmas should only be seen as soon as Thanksgiving is done and dusted. Also, who really would want every night to be Christmas Eve and every day to be Christmas Day? Only a really warped mind... the mind of Manx.

Like how his father writes, Joe Hill has written a behemoth book here, coming in at over seven hundred pages! And at least in the case of this story that is several hundred pages too long. This book is just drawn out when making it shorter would have given it a bit more punch. Again, looking to his father, the new adaptation of It was only a little over two hours and yet it handily covered all the salient points of a book that's over a thousand pages long. And there we have a far bigger cast. In fact all of Stephen King's really big books deal with large casts of characters, so it makes sense that their stories would need to be longer. But here? Here we have two main characters and three important secondary characters, and a handful of tertiary characters. That is not enough characters to warrant this length! In fact I'm kind of scratching my head as to how exactly AMC is going to stretch this book out for ten episodes when it airs later this year... wait, never mind, scratch that. They made almost nothing happen for hours and hours on The Terror, they'll find some way to make it last ten hours, even if one hour is just a young Vic riding around on her bike... But this does show to me the need for editors to be like, "Hey Joe, you know sometimes less is better?" I'd rather have a tight story that delivers than a rambling story that has a few key things I kind of liked. This is again when I need to remind myself to read Joe's shorter fiction, because I have a feeling he'd rock the short story. His books usually have just enough plot to be a short story once edited down.

One thing I was rather worried about when reading the description of N0S4A2 was that this is a book about a man who abducts children. My concern wasn't the abduction but the possible molestation angle. If there's one thing I can't read about it's that. I can't handle it. So therefore I'm here to tell you with a slight spoiler that if you were worried about kiddie fiddling, there is none of that here. Manx and his associates never molest the children. Manx in fact views that by spiriting the children off to Christmasland that he's saving the children from horrid parents and giving them a dream life. A life he gave to his own children in fact. But that doesn't mean this book isn't brutal because there's Bing. Bing, aptly named after the singer, is a lover of Christmas and a vicious human being who longs to be rewarded by getting to go to Christmasland and live there forever. Bing is the Renfield to Manx's Dracula and Bing is down for the creepy shit. His home, which he calls the House of Sleep, is where he killed his parents and where he takes all the parents of those kids Manx spirits away. Because you can't have the parents lurking about asking questions and causing problems! No, you need them killed, raped, dismembered, anything gross or disgusting or horrific that happens in this book happens at the hands of Bing. One wonders if his namesake would approve... So while I was very happy the book wasn't brutal in one direction, it's still a brutal book, just more of the kind we're used to. That's not to mean it's palatable in the least, just not as horrific.

Yet Bing isn't the most problematic character, that would fall to our protagonist Vic. She's an odd character because she's almost living her life on autopilot. Whatever happens happens and she doesn't really do anything proactive. Something happens and she reacts, but she almost seems absent from her own story. I think it's because besides having severe psychological issues she has major self-esteem issues as well and she's always denigrating herself. So much so that despite being constantly shown as a serious bad ass she looks to the men in her life as saviors. Her husband Lou and even her father are given these big, grand, heroic moments to make their sacrifices and Vic is counting on and needing them. She constantly calls Lou the real hero! I just don't get it. Or maybe I do... this book is written by a man and men like to rescue the damsel in distress so by making the damsel really damaged the men can come in and rescue her. And doesn't that just piss me off. This story should be about Vic and her triumphant defeat of Charlie Manx, but even there she is almost subsumed within him. He is all powerful and she, she's just a brat. Even that nickname given to Vic at the beginning of the book should have been a hint. It's a way to classify and limit women in what role they can play in their own story. Victoria McQueen, a casualty because of men.

One part of the book I really connected with though was Vic going across the bridge for the first time to find her mother's bracelet. This just resonated with me because of an incident in my own life. When I was in sixth grade, so three years older than Vic when she discovered her powers, we were to bring in an old school picture of our parents to put up on display. We had no pictures of my dad from when he was in school, but my mom had many. She went to school in a one room schoolhouse and when she graduated was the only one in her grade and was the last kid in the state of Wisconsin to graduate from a one room school. She had a picture of all the kids in the room and on the back they had all signed it. Why she would ever have entrusted this artifact to me or my teacher is beyond reckoning, yet she did. I think you can guess where this is going... The picture was lost. It was just gone. I remember my mom unleashing fury like I've never known and my teachers scouring every inch of my classroom, just tearing it apart to find it. That gut punch of the picture being gone was just like the scene where Vic's mom realizes her bracelet is gone and I know exactly the feeling that pushed Vic out into those woods to find that bracelet no matter how she could. To bend time and distance to just stop the arguing. Oh, if only I had had a bike that could cut reality like a knife, of all the miseries I suffered when I was younger, this would be an easy fix. Just go to the picture and bring it home. I probably wouldn't get credit for it though...

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Charles Manx, Child Molestation, Christmas, Christmasland, Going Gothic, Inscape, Joe Hill, Lost and Found, Miniseries, Misery, N0S4A2, School, Stephen King, The Shining, The Terror, Under the Dome, Victoria McQueen

Under the Dome by Stephen King
Published by: Scribner
Publication Date: November 10th, 2009
Format: Kindle, 1092 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

One fall day a dome mysteriously appears around the town of Chester's Mill, Maine. No one knows how or why. Over the preceding week tensions rise and the death toll mounts. Jim Rennie, the local second selectman with a Napoleon complex has spent his life constrained somewhat by the laws of the United States. It hasn't stopped him creating the biggest Meth empire in all of North America, but it has stopped him instituting martial law and making himself the town's benevolent dictator. The arrival of the dome is a dream come true. With his megalomania unconstrained, he orchestrates the events in Chester's Mill like a gifted composer. With Rennie working against the rest of the town trying and praying to be released, will the situation stay firmly under his control, or will his sins come to claim his so that he will be eating at the Lord's table by dinnertime?

Back in 2009 when this book came out I was super excited. I had just gotten a Kindle for my birthday back in August and I viewed this book as made for my Kindle. I mean, the book is over a thousand pages and could easily kill someone, even in paperback form. So a Kindle purchase it was. And there it sat. It's easier to neglect books on your Kindle then on your bookshelves because they aren't staring at you every day. It sat as a little electronic file in a little folder that says "Stephen King" that, as time went on, got pushed further and further back because of my Kindle's ludicrous need to keep files in order of when they were last opened verses the logical alphabet! Also, you know what, while I like that the Kindle has ease and access to out of print books, it just somehow has never drawn me in as much as a real book.

Flash forward to 2013 and summer's hottest new TV series, Under the Dome. Yep, before I even got to reading it it has become a TV series. I have always loved Stephen King TV series and special television events. They are tacky and over the top and above all fun in that guilty TV viewing way. So, seeing as I had a feeling I wouldn't pick up the book in the near future I started watching the show and got hooked. It's never going to be a favorite show or even one I will necessarily ever watch again, but, it is fun. When I heard it was picked up for a second season I realized that, what was fun and over the top, would leave me hanging and therefore invariably piss me off. I had read enough about the show and Stephen King's involvement to know that the show was going to drastically vary from the book, all with Stephen King's blessing, but knowing that it was to go beyond this summer I felt I needed some closure. I knew the book is a different ending so I figured, what the hell, I'll pick it up, finally, get some closure but not be spoiled at the same time. It was win win in my mind. And so I read the book, all thousand plus pages of it, and now I'm left with an odd sensation. The book didn't give me any closure and now I'm more pissed then ever that the show won't end this year.

The first thing I would like to say that this book taught me is that I would not survive under the dome. I don't keep enough food stockpiled. I have no weapons, no generator, no propane or batteries... I would be one of the first to die. But seeing as the death rate was insanely high in this book at least I would be one of the many not one of the few. Previous to this King book I had only read two of his other works, Misery and The Shining. Both these books have small, intimate casts with people isolated from society. The other end of the spectrum is books like Under the Dome and The Stand, which was a favorite miniseries of mine due to Corin "Parker Lewis" Nemec and Molly Ringwald, I mean seriously, the John Hughes girl all grown up and in a Stephen King miniseries, how could you not love this tack? Watching and reading are two different things though and the cast of Under the Dome was so large I just knew vaguely who they were, there were the "bad cops" and the "good cops," who can remember their names, I didn't, and then people in general categories based on where they usually where, like the "hospital people" and the "newspaper people." Also, when you have this many people, having a Ginny and a Gina both and the hospital, thank you Stephen King for giving me a headache. Add to that the fact that even the good guys were pretty unlikable, and well, who am I rooting for? Because personally, I think just having Junior Rennie and his posse (which is so Malfoy's posse from Slytherin) set loose on the town would have been funny and ended the book a lot earlier.

But let me get to the crux of my problem with the book, which wasn't the overtly hypocritical religiosity or the fact that I think the dome should have isolated them more like on the television show. I shall warn you that right now I'm going to give away the ending, because, let's face it, I was able to guess the ending five minutes in and it's not that shocking. Yes folks, it's aliens! Why? We don't know. This is a total cop out. At least explain something about it more then, "oh, they thought we were ants and it would be fun." Excuse me? They did it because they could? Well at least tell me more about the dome's properties? Like was the dome causing all these people to commit suicide? Because some of the animals were and, well, we are animals, so was that something the dome did or was it just based on people taking the easy way out? Explain! Also, you know, we've spent, a thousand pages with these people, maybe a few lines of how they handled life after they got out of the dome please? Now that you killed Benny did Joe and Norrie get together because she no longer had to choose? Anything Stephen, anything? Nope... ok. Guess I'll go sit in a fug over here. And by the way, having Jack Reacher show up was lame and a Lost reference, really? You should be better then this Stephen King.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments  

Labels: Aliens, Chester's Mill, Corin Nemic, Jack Reacher, Jim Rennie, Kindle, Lost, Miniseries, Misery, Molly Ringwald, Slytherin, Stephen King, The Shining, The Stand, Under the Dome