Secrets, Some Of Them Even True
fiction
+Horror Library+ 7, Available Now!
The long-running and much-loved horror anthology +Horror Library+, published through Dark Moon Books, has released its latest iteration and your humble music nerd/fiction writer servant has a piece included in it! Check out the links below to get your own copy. If you’re into horror it’s a no-brainer.
New Music Roundup, January 21st – 27th, 2022
Fourth Time, First Win: NaNoWriMo 2021
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New Music Roundup, July 9th-July 15th
Round-Up, May 21st-May 27th
Text Mining: Cujo
When it comes to my least favourite King novels, Cujo is third. Why? It’s disjointed, for one; a lot of the book is taken up by the foibles of the Sharp Cereal Professor and honestly I can’t bring myself to care enough about the dying art of marketing kid’s cereals in the early 1980s. Also, the Trentons are not sympathetic characters. Look, I’ve written elsewhere about how your characters don’t necessarily need to be likable. I’ve gone off at length about how needing your characters to be the reader’s best friend is just a trap that encourages an immature fanbase that will rise up and kidnap you when you decide to kill those characters off…
Wait, actually, I think that was Misery.
Text Mining: Firestarter
Firestarter: another classic King tale of a troubled young girl who develops strange psychic powers and uses them to literally burn people alive. Charlie and her dad are chased by a mysterious U.S. alphabet agency bent on weaponizing the intersection of science and paranormal research. Half the book is the chase; the other half is the catch, and that combination makes for some interesting results, as we’ll see.
Text Mining: The Dead Zone
You want to talk about an out-there outlier for what we’ve seen of Stephen King’s bibliography so far, let’s talk about The Dead Zone.
A quick run-down: John Smith suffers a head injury as a kid but comes out mostly ok. Greg Stillson is a crazy but wildly charismatic traveling salesman. Johnny becomes a teacher, falls in love, and then is driven into a coma by a car accident. When he emerges he has wild psychic powers where he can touch people and know both their secrets and their future. He endures some tabloid celebrity, solves murders, tries to keep teaching and being normal, saves some kids from dying, and then discovers that Stillson, now running for office, is going to win and eventually become President briefly before destroying the world in a nuclear holocaust. Johnny becomes a would-be assassin, dying but also revealing Stillson to be a huge coward and an electoral loser after he grabs a kid as a human shield. It’s a timely examination of the American hunger for an end to the seemingly endless corrupt two-party circus and a bit of a satire of the then-blossoming American Tabloid market.
Text Mining: The Shining
I completely skipped The Shining somehow, so we’ll circle back and do that one now.
The Shining (1977)
Stephen King’s third novel finds him cycling through doing his own take on all the classic horror bits: the avenging revenant of Carrie, updating Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the modern (in 1976) age in Salem’s Lot, and now the Haunted House – in this case, a whole haunted hotel. There’s an element of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House in Salem’s Lot as well; the house that the villain Barlow moves into in the Lot is a long-time haunted house inhabited by cursed individuals. The Overlook Hotel has been the destination of rich, shady people since it’s inception and by the time full-time alcoholic/on-his-last-chance writer Jack Torrence comes around to be it’s winter caretaker, it’s charged with their energies: the awful, unspeakable emotions that were left behind and whose ghosts now bestow a strong, malevolent force of will upon the hotel.
Structures Capable Of Joy 