Book Review: Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King

The Shining was one of the first adult horror novels I ever read – coming before it were Carrie (I chose it because it was really short), Salem’s Lot (Vampires!), and Firestarter (because how can you beat a title like that?), but the more of these books I read the more I needed to read. I read The Shining for the first time in grade eight, and I’ve got to say, the book really stuck with me.

I don’t know if it was the idea of this creepy hotel, or the claustrophobic feel the whole novel quickly began to build, but at the time it really unnerved me, especially as the lead was a five-year-old boy with some telepathic powers (called The Shining in the novel), desperate to save his family from the horrors of The Overlook Hotel.

By the way, if you’ve never read The Shining, you should definitely pick it up. Although the 1980 film has a lot in common with the original novel, the book is much, much scarier.

So decades later and in my late 30s, I pick up Stephen King’s newest book, Doctor Sleep, which follows Dan Torrence, the now grown five-year-old from the original novel, and his involvement with a deranged family that hunt for other kids with The Shining – and not to help them out.

I really don’t want to give away plot points for the book (It’s been on shelves for a few weeks at the point I’m writing this post), but it is well worth the cost and not just to see how things worked out for Dan. The new villains in the book are some of the more terrifying I’ve come across in recent fiction – except for Charlie Manx from Joe Hill’s NOS4A2 (which also has connections with this book), and it was incredibly hard for me to put down when I needed to be working or visiting with friends and family.

Genre Character of the Week: Ig Parrish

So I literally just finished Joe Hill's second novel, Horns about five minutes ago.  Although it was his second novel, and I'm usually quite big about readings an author's work in publishing order, I was introduced to the author with his first novel, Heart-Shaped Box (excellent, by the way), and then moved on to his comic book series, Locke & Key.

Horns follows our Genre Character of the week: Ig Parrish, a young man who has just woken up from a really bad drinking binge and finds he now has horns growing out of his head.

Ig has spent the last year of his life being a "person of interest" in the rape and murder of his long time girlfriend, so it's safe to say he is pretty much hit bottom at the point the novel begins.  The interesting thing about the horns, however, is that people seem to act differently around Ig now, telling him secrets they would never share with anyone else, and asking for his permission to act on their darkest impulses.

What I really like about Ig is that through this entire strange, hellish novel, he always comes across as a real person, a three dimensional human being doing his best to understand a world that no longer makes any sense at all.

A film adaptation of the novel will be coming out later this year, and I'm definitely interested in seeing how it turns out.

Genre Character of the Week: Margaret Leigh

As a soon-to-be librarian myself, I’ve always been a sucker for librarians in fiction.  Whether the love interested of a time traveler on a mission in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 or the supportive mentor for a young girl in trouble in Jo Walton’s Among Others, I simply start to smile when any book I’m reading introduces a librarian as a character, rather than simply a stereotype.

In Joe Hill’s NOS4A2, that librarian is Margaret Leigh, and unlike a lot of fictional librarians I can think of, she has a pretty unique ability.

The problem is, I really don’t want to spoil any of the story of NOS4A2 – which went on sale yesterday, as the book is just so darn good. In simplest terms, I like Margaret because she comes across as a three-dimensional character, and even though there are shades of the mythical Cassandra in her, she seems very much a person with her own identity.

The novel follows a young woman, Victoria McQueen, through an incredibly dark experience in her childhood and then races forward to her own parenting years and puts her in an even darker spot, as this time her child is at risk.

The novel is definitely Dark Fantasy, is clearly influenced by the works of Stephen King (in a great way), and had me putting an immediate hold on the only Joe Hill book I haven’t read so far, his 2010 Novel, Horns.

Thing's I've Noticed: I'm ahead on my reading!

It's the strangest thing, once I didn't have classes (and the assigned readings for classes) I blew through my list of readings for April incredibly quickly - I'm just finishing up the last one right now which means I get to pick another Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction title to read this month!!!

So next up for me will be a fantasy novel I've been meaning to read for a while now Down the Mystery River, by Bill Willingham, an advanced readers copy of the new Joe Hill novel NOS4A2, and one of the many science fiction novels that have been sitting on my "to be read" shelf.

Finishing stuff is awesome!