Thursday, December 02, 2021

King of Wishful Thinking

So, I read my first Steven King novel. 

It's true. I've seen adaptations of his work and I'll just say, I wasn't a fan. 

Sure, I know movie folk take liberties with the written word, but even with that, it wasn't enough to convince me to tackle a 400-600 page book.   

....not that size matters. 

But Morty (again with Morty!) steered me to King's new release, Billy Summers, as it wasn't a scary story. So, what the hey.........I got the book. 

So, I really have no other King novels in which to compare his style. He's detailed - almost to a fault. And then he's not. Kind of. 

Like so many novels lately, the first two-thirds are great and well thought out, yet the last third (or less) seems to be jam-packed just to get everything in / done and wrapped up. It's annoying.........to me. I'm also not a fan of the book-within-a-book concept, but it kind of works here. 

I think (?) it's hard to ignore over the last 5-6 years, but King is not a fan of BLOTUS. With what little I use my twitter account - and don't follow King - you can't help but see some of his spewings on BLOTUS.  So I laugh at the amazon reviews where people are aghast (!!!) at King disparaging the (now former) president. 

Honestly, it is 5-6 small references throughout 500+ pages. None of them villainous as they could or should have been. Though I don't doubt the appearances of a less than semi Jeffrey Epstein and Rupert Murdoch like characters got hackles raised too. 

Actually, that is where the book kind of falls apart too. For me.  It's part of the shoe-horned last third scenario. There is also an illogical surprise semi-ending, which doesn't really fit either. In theory it could have........but again, I'm guessing a publisher's deadline thwarted that. 

For the first King outing, I'd give it a B-.  Had it stayed on the first 2/3 trajectory, I'd have moved that up a few letter grades. 



Song by: Go West

2 comments:

James Dwight Williamson said...

He does hate BLOTUS. He seems talented, I’m not crazy for his genre either much.

Ur-spo said...

I've read a couple and stopped; I didn't care for the style of prose.