kingofspain93's reviews
325 reviews

The Outsider by Stephen King

1.5

I love Doppelgänger stories, and this was not a good one. King has high points, and a couple of genuinely scary moments, but it ends up being his usual monster-of-the-week plot. I'll say this: as soon as it became clear that a shapeshifter was responsible for the murder I lost a great deal of interest. it would have made for a more compelling and challenging story if it had actually been Terry, if he had actually been in two places at once (consciously or unconsciously), or at least if it had been ambiguous. Americans love the serial killer mythos because it means they don't have to grapple with how evil every man is. the rapist and killer is never some drifting bogeyman; it is in fact always the model father and husband, the dude who is loved by the community, etc. I hadn't seen the Doppelgänger used to explore this before and unfortunately I still haven't. King just doesn't know how to capitalize on the frightening scenarios he can devise and instead always falls back on the typical universal good v. universal evil story he has been telling his whole career.

I think bullet pointed reviews are the sign of someone looking to react rather than synthesize and I usually avoid writing them. this time there are a bunch of consistent terrible issues with King's writing and I just wanted to exorcise myself of them so here goes:

• Horrendous handling of race. You'll know exactly who the BIPOC characters are because they will explicitly state their race in dialogue (“my wide Indian ass”) or otherwise be aggressively identified by the narration in reductive ways. because King is so bad at writing he uses non-white race as a quick way to give characters “personality.” the race of the white characters is never commented on. repeated casual use of racist epithets throughout.

• King has recycled the same two dozen or so characters in every book across his career. if you've read It, for example, you can draw a chart connecting everyone in that novel to their counterpart in The Outsider. and none of them were interesting to begin with.

• worse, one of his recycled character types is “woman.” every major female character in The Outsider exists and acts in dependent relation to a primary man in their lives. psychologically they are all helpless teen girls in women's bodies. you better be sure all their tit sizes and BMIs get a shout-out.

• adult characters use words like “frack,” “poopy,” “bull-pucky,” and so on. King’s vocabulary is stunted, sure, but even more off-putting is that it seems to have stopped growing in a 1950s locker room. King writes like a 70+ year old man who hasn't developed internally (or listened to other people) since adolescence.

• references to contemporary media and technology feel as instantly dated as everything else in King's personal universe. you get the sense that he is naming things from different eras at random. he must be the only person on earth for whom the Huffington Post was still relevant in 2018.

• King can't write interesting characters, and his good guys are universally boring. every character talks and sound about the same. all use the same regional sayings from half a century ago and all are obsessed with referencing movies, brand names, and how cool iPads are.

• King's bad guys are all inevitably disappointments because they end up talking and thinking just like his good guys. the monster isn't scary anymore when it starts talking like the bully from Back to the Future.

• King conflates being a pedophile with being a violent sexual criminal. like, jesus, read a book.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3.5

Atwood writes about the frightening socialized immaturity and emptiness of men quite well, but her supposedly radical-leaning female characters (Moira and the narrator's mother) are flat. similarly, when talking to the Commander Offred argues not that women's autonomy was overlooked in the construction of Gilead but that “love” is the thing that's missing. seriously? the world-building is impressive but the articulation of sexist degradation comes across as more conceptual than felt. I am a dude so doubtless I am missing nuance but this didn't connect with me.

it doesn't help that I read the (much better, much scarier, much more beautiful) Manacled first, or that I was reading Fall on Your Knees (which has insanely good character-driven writing) at the same time as this. The Handmaid's Tale felt like a shadow compared to those two books.

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

5.0

every now and then I read a book so beautiful that it fixes old hurts. Fall On Your Knees takes sadness and evil and love and delivers it all like a raw aching dream. MacDonald manages her huge cast of characters with immense skill and humanity. like Dostoevsky she redeems the novel as a medium. I love these girls with all my heart.

My First Box of Books: 1-2-3, Colours, Animals by

5.0

doesn't follow any annoying rhyme scheme or predictable structural conventions, just throws a bunch of top-tier art at you in pretty colors and ends with little games where you are encouraged to name and count things on the page. feels engaging and not condescending. if I'm asking my kid to name the color of the flowers I want the flowers to look like a wobbly Monet. and every animal is so so cute.

Precious Little Sleep: The Complete Baby Sleep Guide for Modern Parents by Alexis Dubief

2.0

this was useful and without it I don't know when I would have realized that you can get a baby to fall asleep independently. the author is fucking annoying though. her attempt at personality is a fire hose of clunky pop culture references, coffee jokes, and strained metaphors. she's like one of the parents who got way too into Facebook and it changed every conversation you ever had with them again to a deeply depressing experience where you struggled to recognize anything that once allowed you to be emotionally vulnerable or intellectually curious with them. if this were cut down to the 20 pages of content it contains it would be great.

But Not the Hippopotamus by Sandra Boynton

3.0

it's fine. the rhymey ones need to work twice as hard to have soul and this one doesn't. when I was a kid there was a scene in the move Wakko’s Wish where a mime was sad because he didn't have a real vehicle (he's a mime) and so he didn't get to go on the adventure for the wish or whatever. it was supposed to be a joke but the thought of someone being left out made me really sad for him. anyway that's how I feel about the poor fucking armadillo.

The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones
Did not finish book. Stopped at 35%.

predictable junk. a bad author is never more obvious than when they're trying to write charming wit. I quit when a character delivered some snarky internal reflection out loud then said “I must stop talking to myself” for the third time. I hate twists and I hate contemporary fiction and I hate mishandled ghost stories and I hate the British.

I Love You Night and Day by Smriti Prasadam-Halls

3.5

one of those kids books that tries to distill the impossible amount of love you have for your child into a sweet rhyme. another hallmark of this type of book is that it is designed to make parents weep. I Love You Night and Day is not the strongest of this genre but it's still cute.

Solar System by Jill McDonald

3.75

I'm an adult and planets still kind of freak me out. like saying that Jupiter is the stormiest planet in the solar system is such a scary thought. somewhere out there is a giant world of storms and it has been there every day of my life. as I write this a storm rages on an alien planet and I can't even comprehend it. I was home schooled by idiots and got no science education (literally none) so probably if I had been actually taught stuff I would be less scared of Jupiter. but I'm not.

Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari

4.0

appropriately subtitled A Study and Translation by Anthony H. Chambers, this edition has a ton of great supporting scholarship included that contextualizes Akinari’s stories for English-speaking audiences. I admire Chambers’ approach to translation (as much as I can when it's a white guy translating Asian lit) because he makes a point that I've never seen expressed as elegantly:

To reflect adequately in translation the style and tone of the original text is a tall order. Akinari was a great master of Japanese, but few of us who translate from Japanese are great masters of English.

as a Westerner he is clearly already at an epistemological disadvantage in his work, but I've never seen a translator acknowledge that translation is an act of rewriting and few translators are master authors. Chambers really takes time to impress upon the reader everything that is being lost by their not reading Akinari’s masterwork in Japanese and I think that's respectably honest when you're trying to sell your translation. I will also say that the translation was highly readable and captured a unique authorial tone without feeling completely adapted to Western sensibilities, which was one of Chambers’ stated goals.

Akinari’s stories are dreamy and haunted. The Chrysanthemum Vow, A Serpent’s Lust, and The Blue Hood were my favorites. A Serpent's Lust especially seemed extremely modern in its style while still owing a great deal to traditional folklore motifs. I found myself looking forward to each story which is such a fun experience! minus a star for how sexist 18th century Japan was!