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2.28k reviews for:

Needful Things

Stephen King

3.84 AVERAGE

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes
adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No
dark mysterious tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character

A great bit of Stephen King! Smart, funny, sickening, and swift. This was a great story with a fantastic cast of broken characters whose own desires get the best of them. Like many of the best King books, he takes you into the lives and minds of many different characters allowing you to get a feel for the whole cast of victims in his story. The story comes to a satisfying (if somewhat deus ex) climax that makes for a great read. Definitely one of my favorite King reads of a long while.
dark mysterious tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

⭐⭐⭐1/2

Needful Things indeed. I did really like this book, and I like the Castle Rock tales.

A man enters a small town (Castle Rock actually) and opens a shop. Inside this shop is exactly what you need (or do you??) because for everything you need, there is a price. Great characters, good story, okay ending.
dark tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
challenging dark mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Stephen King is not for me. I’m not his audience and that’s fine. To me, the opening where someone is talking directly to us, making observations about the people in town we’re seeing, is annoying and I don’t like it. It almost made me put the book down. Personally, I would have cut everything about the Baptists and Catholics fighting about gambling. It’s a long book and ultimately I don’t think any of that was necessary. I don’t hate the concept of the book, but I find King’s approach to be cartoonish and overly cinematic, like “This would be good for when they make this into a movie.” Have they made this one into a movie yet? Probably, idk. Sometimes Leland Gaunt would be literally tapping his fingers together, laughing an evil laugh, and plotting to himself—what a cartoon! Omg.

So… the book was not for me. It’s also easy for me to look back at this book that came out in 1991 and be totally disgusted by the way King throws rape around as some kind of humorous metaphor and makes the women disgusting, slavishly fighting over who gets to fuck Elvis Presley all day, shit like that. A lot has changed these past 30 years, including, I’ll bet, Stephen King himself. When you know better, you do better. I also recognize that much of what I view as cartoonish cliché was, in fact, made that way by King’s popularizing it so successfully. So I’m not putting the book down (literally or metaphorically), I’m just saying, it wasn’t for me. Props to him for killing the dog, though. I love dogs but I hate this modern idea that it’s not okay to kill the dog in a story. Everyone is fair game for murder, I say. To me, killing a chicken is equally as bad. So good on you, Stephen, kill the fictional dog.