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elenajohansen 's review for:
Four Past Midnight
by Stephen King
This was a slog, and it never grabbed me. With anthologies, at least there's the chance that starting a new story will revive my interest, but I found these all about equally lackluster.
So, The Langoliers. I have incredibly vague memories of watching the TV-movie adaptation in my teens, but all I really remembered was the antagonist and his paper-tearing glee. I was hoping the story itself would be more substantial, but surprise surprise, it felt to me like half the scenes were just this one mentally unhinged dude and his nervous habit.
Secret Window, Secret Garden was billed in King's brief introductory comments as "what if I did The Dark Half over again but slightly different?" And seeing as how my review of The Dark Half was "there's a good novel hiding somewhere inside all of this inane repetition," I had higher hopes for this novella. I was disappointed. It was not better, and in some ways it was definitely worse. I knew what was going on long before the reveal (and I'm pretty sure I was supposed to) yet there wasn't a lot of factual detail to support my (correct) assumption, and the explanation after the fact was tedious.
The Library Policeman tried my patience even more, because the word/phrase repetition that irks me so much in general, and specifically in "bad" Stephen King writing, was even more on display here than in the previous two novellas. Dude could not go two pages without obsessing about the freaking suspended ceiling in the library. And I didn't find Ardelia Lortz the sort of creepy-compelling character you want in a villain, and the whole thing was just a mess to me.
...I didn't finish The Sun Dog, which technically makes this a DNF review, but I was just out of interest at this point, and I want to read other things. Even other Stephen King, I've got The Regulators lined up before the end of the year. I've long since accepted that while I admire King as a person in many ways and love many of his books, he's also written SO MUCH and some of it is just not very good. This is one of those collections for me.
So, The Langoliers. I have incredibly vague memories of watching the TV-movie adaptation in my teens, but all I really remembered was the antagonist and his paper-tearing glee. I was hoping the story itself would be more substantial, but surprise surprise, it felt to me like half the scenes were just this one mentally unhinged dude and his nervous habit.
Secret Window, Secret Garden was billed in King's brief introductory comments as "what if I did The Dark Half over again but slightly different?" And seeing as how my review of The Dark Half was "there's a good novel hiding somewhere inside all of this inane repetition," I had higher hopes for this novella. I was disappointed. It was not better, and in some ways it was definitely worse. I knew what was going on long before the reveal (and I'm pretty sure I was supposed to) yet there wasn't a lot of factual detail to support my (correct) assumption, and the explanation after the fact was tedious.
The Library Policeman tried my patience even more, because the word/phrase repetition that irks me so much in general, and specifically in "bad" Stephen King writing, was even more on display here than in the previous two novellas. Dude could not go two pages without obsessing about the freaking suspended ceiling in the library. And I didn't find Ardelia Lortz the sort of creepy-compelling character you want in a villain, and the whole thing was just a mess to me.
...I didn't finish The Sun Dog, which technically makes this a DNF review, but I was just out of interest at this point, and I want to read other things. Even other Stephen King, I've got The Regulators lined up before the end of the year. I've long since accepted that while I admire King as a person in many ways and love many of his books, he's also written SO MUCH and some of it is just not very good. This is one of those collections for me.