Book Review—Doctor Sleep

I've been reading Stephen King for about 30 years. Started reading him at what a lot of folks might say is too young... but my parents, fortunately, were not among them, and they had no problem with me reading Cujo and  Pet Semetery at the age of 10 or so. The fact that my Grandma gave me these books to read probably helped.

Anyway, as the world knows, Stephen King's written a bazillion books. And when you write that many, some will be brilliant and some will be terrible. His latest, Doctor Sleep, isn't brilliant (although it certainly has a few moments of it at the start and at the end), but it's consistently good. It's less concerned with horror than it is with character, and since character is where King is the best, that's fine with me. It's also interesting that, while there is a large cast of villains in the book (a band of road-wandering child-killing vampires who drink psychic powers, not blood) who are pretty reprehensible (what with the child killing and all that)... you kinda end up feeling a little sorry for them. In fact, the villains of Doctor Sleep are strangely out of their league against our protagonists, which is an unusual way to tell a story about child-killing mind-drinking vampires.

OH! It's a sequel to The Shining also. One of the scariest books King's written, and one of the best, perhaps THE best book about a haunted house I've read—it's only competition would be Nazareth Hill or The Haunting of Hill House. As he mentions in is afterword, Stephen King was a very different person when he wrote The Shining, and it shows. And not in a bad way! But... I love The Shining, and it's hard to top it. King doesn't try to top it—Doctor Sleep tells a VERY different story that just happens to be about Danny Torrence, the same little boy, now all grown up, who once saw something very bad in the Overlook Hotel.

Doctor Sleep...

• ... needed only 7 or so pages to give me the chills. It never really equals the dread of those first few pages... but then again, it's not really trying to. The dread is a cool carry over from The Shining to ease you out of that book's world and into the world of Doctor Sleep.
• ... will confuse folks who only know the Kubrick version of The Shining. King's version is pretty different.
• ... makes me eager to see King do squeals to other novels. Pet Semetery, in particular.

Grade: B+

Book Review—The Twelve

One of the things that kind of bugs me is when I'm reading a novel that's part of a series, and I've read the previous installments of said series, but then the novelist spends too much time reminding you of what happened before, as if said novelist doesn't trust that you've read the previous stories.

That's certainly not a problem with Justin Cronin's The Twelve, the second book in his vampire apocalypse saga. I was VERY impressed with the first in the series, The Passage, and eagerly tore into this one. As with The Passage, the first significant portion of the book functions as a sort of prequel, detailing events during the events that brought about the end of the world, introducing us to several really cool characters as we follow their efforts to survive in a world where vampirisim is taking over.

The bulk of the novel, of course, takes place about 100 years after that, focusing on most of the same characters from the first novel. They're no longer naive young adults, now, though; they've had a harrowing time in their journey, and they're now pretty rough around the edges. And if anything, some of the things they go through in this one are among the more harrowing ordeals I've read recently... not because of the violent or horrifying nature of their ordeals so much as because by the time things really start going bad, you're really invested in the characters. Cronin does a great job making you care about the characters, and the way he almost casually reveals near the start of the novel that some of the previous novel's survivors have died in the time between the two novels, it's really unsettling and distressing.

And that brings me back to the start of the review. There's a spoiler-free Dramatis Personae at the back of the book... but it's SO spoiler-free that it kinda doesn't help. I really should have done what I do whenever a new Song of Ice and Fire book comes out—read up the Wikipedia pages for the previous books to get reminded about where things were at when last we left our heroes and villains behind.

The book itself, though? It's excellent. Cronin does a brilliant job at presenting the vampires as creatures of science but also creatures of supernatural mystery. In fact, the science is so prevalent near the first half of the book that as things that are more and more unexplainable by science happen, they really do feel spooky and frightening in a way they wouldn't had the vampires had blatantly supernatural powers from the very beginning.

Looking forward eagerly to the next in the series!

The Twelve...

• ... isn't afraid to kill off characters you've come to like, nor is it afraid to bring back characters you thought were killed off!
• ... faces the reader with some difficult truths, in that it casts sympathetic characters in the role of suicide bombers, and manages to make you understand why such tactics might be the only choice, which is kinda disturbing.
• ... has a somewhat frustrating habit of skipping some of the more exciting action scenes and revealing what happens only after the fact, but certainly doesn't skip away from the hard to read parts about some pretty vile stuff.
• ... raised some pretty interesting questions that I hope will be explored in the third and final book—not the least of which is what's going on beyond the USA 100 years in the future!

Grade: A –