Books I Didn't Finish: The Stephen King Detective Two-For-One Experience

I was recently in the hospital for a week, heavily doped up on pain medication (it wasn’t anything serious) and I needed a breezy, light book to pass the time. And lo and behold, the Kindle daily deal happened to feature a selection from my spooky frenemy, Stephen King!

That book was Mr. Mercedes, the first entry in what would become a trilogy revolving around a detective named Bill Hodges. The books are kind of notable in King’s ouvre for moving all the way out of horror and into the mystery/thriller genre, a space that many of his previous novels strayed pretty far into without entirely making the leap away from horror or the supernatural. Today we’re looking at Mr. Mercedes as well as its sequel, Finders Keepers.

The fact that I didn’t bother to read the third one is a spoiler.

Read More

Guest Post: Insane Clown Premise

NOTE: This is a guest post by a friend of The Blogger. There will most likely be more of these, probably on the subject of horror. Think of them as a nice lead-in to the annual Spooktober tradition.

Quite some time ago I attempted to read Stephen King’s IT while working at one of those jobs that are so boring they should by all rights be illegal. The book proved to be a good choice; at this stage in my development as a reader I wasn’t yet tired of King’s fondness for stuffing massive amounts of character backstory into all of his novels, so I had a perfectly fine time reading about the inhabitants of Derry, Maine (of course) in their child and adult forms even before the evil clown showed up.

But then the clown did show up, and…uh.

Read More