Night Shift by Stephen King

Synopsis

In places where fear swells and blood runs cold, sinister forces and unspeakable things are working the night shift.


From the depths of darkness, where hideous rats defend their empire, to dizzying heights, where a beautiful girl hangs by a hair above hellish fate, this chilling collection of twenty short stories will plunge you into the subterranean labyrinth of the most spine-tingling, eerie imagination of our time.

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I love Stephen King.  I really do.  He is without a doubt one of my favorite authors...if not the favorite.  He never fails to completely captivate me and suck me into his stories.

With that in mind, it pains me to say that I didn't really like this book.  I think my main problem was the fact that it was completely short stories, which yes I knew going into it.  The thing I love most about King's writing is the constant build-up and release of tension.  The suspense is the best part and, when it comes to short stories, there's usually only one build-up and one release.  That's not enough for me.

Now, it wasn't all bad for me.  Of the twenty stories, I did really enjoy three of them.  "Trucks", "Sometimes They Come Back" and "Children of the Corn" were all really good.  Why, you might ask?  Because all three were made into movies that I had already seen and so I already had an appreciation for.  Even then though, the stories weren't nearly as suspenseful for me as the movies were.  One of the rare occasions where the "book" falls short of the movie.

Bottom line, it's not a completely horrible collection of stories.  If the author had been anyone other than King, I would fully give it two thumbs up.  Because it was King and I had these huge expectations for mini-Shinings, I'll give it one and a quarter thumbs.

~Missy

Under the Dome by Stephen King

Plot

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when — or if — it will go away.

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I loved this book. Or, I should say, I loved reading it. The story itself was a little odd, but I say that for one reason and one reason only. It remind so very much of The Simpsons Movie. I tried so hard to keep that out of my head, while I was reading, but I could not keep it out entirely. More on that.

For anyone that has seen The Simpsons Movie, I think you can see where my mind was getting stuck on the movie, just by looking at the book's title...Under the Dome. I remember reading, before the book came out, that King had heard about the comparisons to the Simpsons movie. He commented that the comparisons ended at the town being placed under a mysterious dome. Nope. The comparisons go beyond that. Don't get me wrong, though. It didn't take away from the book. The similar plot points, while being very obvious, were much darker in the book. As they should be, given that this is Stephen King. And, it's not as if The Simpsons were constantly at the back of my mind, while I read. It was just occasionally that the little voice in my head would scream out "SIMPSONS!!"

The book's full of characters you love to love and characters you love to hate. On second thought, to be totally honest, I don't think it's a love to hate. It's just straight up hate. There are characters throughout the book that I found myself wishing would just die, because there was just absolutely nothing redeeming about them. I found this to be both a strong point and a weakness to the book. You hate them so much that you keep reading, just so you can get to the part where they die a horrible death. At the same time, you hate them so much that their inevitable death just does not come fast enough and, in one case, was not horrible enough.

Bottom line, this is a book to read. Maybe not if you're a Bible-Thumping Republican. Let's be honest, if you're a Bible lovin' conservative and read this book, you're probably going to want to burn it, when you're done. And, I don't mean the "Oh this book was horrible" sort of book burning. I mean in the "Fahrenheit 451/Books lead to knowledge/Harry Potter promotes the occult" sort of book burning...if you catch my drift.

~Missy