Sigh.
You know, I love me some Stephen King. When he's on, he's on like Donkey Kong and no one can touch his ability to tell a story.
Unfortunately, this collection falls a bit short. King was inspired to release another short story collection after editing the latest Great American Short Story compilation. Great, fantastic; King writes wonderful short stories. Only, not here. Oh, some of them reach that level that you'd expect but most of the stories _ I'm sorry Stephen King because I truly do love you and I LOVED Lisey's Story even though a lot of people didn't _ are just ... forgettable.
For me, the strongest story in the collection is ''N.'', which is King doing what he does best _ scaring the growth out of you with seemingly everyday things. In this, a patient with bad OCD comes to a therapist. The story unfolds through the therapist's case-notes as "N." explains how he came to have OCD and why it's so terribly important to keep counting ... everything.
Beyond that, I'm hard-pressed to remember the details of a lot of the stories. I found The Cat from Hell entertaining, and the last story in the collection _ about a man locked in a portable toilet by a vengeful neighbour.
I get the impression that King put the collection together in kind of a hurry and I just wish that he had taken a little bit more time, because then we might have been looking at something really special.
You know, I love me some Stephen King. When he's on, he's on like Donkey Kong and no one can touch his ability to tell a story.
Unfortunately, this collection falls a bit short. King was inspired to release another short story collection after editing the latest Great American Short Story compilation. Great, fantastic; King writes wonderful short stories. Only, not here. Oh, some of them reach that level that you'd expect but most of the stories _ I'm sorry Stephen King because I truly do love you and I LOVED Lisey's Story even though a lot of people didn't _ are just ... forgettable.
For me, the strongest story in the collection is ''N.'', which is King doing what he does best _ scaring the growth out of you with seemingly everyday things. In this, a patient with bad OCD comes to a therapist. The story unfolds through the therapist's case-notes as "N." explains how he came to have OCD and why it's so terribly important to keep counting ... everything.
Beyond that, I'm hard-pressed to remember the details of a lot of the stories. I found The Cat from Hell entertaining, and the last story in the collection _ about a man locked in a portable toilet by a vengeful neighbour.
I get the impression that King put the collection together in kind of a hurry and I just wish that he had taken a little bit more time, because then we might have been looking at something really special.
1 comment:
I got the impression that these were written in a hurry too.
Another thing is that King states in the intro he was inspired to write after editing a book in 2006 but 5 of these 13 stories were written before that. And I found many of them had a taste of other works he's done.
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