The Shining Directed & Produced by Stanley Kubrick Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson Based on The Shining by Stephen King 447 pp, Doubleday 1977 Starring Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd Contains spoilers since I discuss the differences in how the two versions end. But the movie is over 40 years …
If It Bleeds by Stephen King, copyright 2020 Scribner, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Every decade or so, Stephen King likes to put out a collection, usually novellas, sometimes short stories, or a mix of both. So to cap the second decade of the third millennium (Also known as “Mankind’s next-to-last decade”), he …
The Secret Commonwealth Phillip Pullman 2019 Borzoi Book, published by Alfred A. Knopf In his introduction to his second book in the Book of Dust series (and fifth in the His Dark Materials set), Pullman gleefully admits he swiped the title from a book called, “The Secret Commonwealth, or an Essay on the Nature and …
The Death of Bunny Munro Nick Cave Canongate Books (UK) Faber & Faber (US) 2009 Bunny Munro has been out there for over 10 years, and was always high on my ‘to read’ list. After all, I like Nick Cave’s music (The Bad Seeds) and I like his movies (The Proposition). He’s got 17 albums, …
Polemical Judo David Brin November 20th 2019 This is the same David Brin who is widely known as a futurist and award-winning science fiction author. He’s always been an outspoken voice for accountability from authority, strong reliance by society on the knowledge to be gained from science, openness of knowledge and data, and deprecation of …
Wanderers Chuck Wendig 782 Pages, July 2019 | Del Rey Books “It’s got a ‘The Stand’ thing going on,” my friend explained. So I downloaded a copy. King’s The Stand is one of my favourite apocalyptic novels, and holds up well after 40 years. Wanderers by Chuck Wendig starts out as a variant ‘zombie apocalypse’ …
The Institute by Stephen King Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster (c) 2019 In the wordcloud that surrounds the career of Stephen Edwin King, one of the biggest has to be “supernatural.” Most of his works have at least some supernatural in them, and they tend to be both his most popular and most …
Cyberhell: a review of Fall; or, Dodge in Hell Author Neal Stephenson Illustrator Nick Springer / Springer Cartographics LLC Cover artist Fritz Metsch Publisher William Morrow an imprint of HarperCollins Publication June 4, 2019 Pages 883 All fiction involves, to one degree or another, ‘world building.’ No matter how hyper-realistic the story wants to be, …
Against the Fall of Night: a review of American Carnage. Copyright © 2019 by Tim Alberta HarperCollins “[Sarah Palin] was the early embodiment of some of the problems that would plague the party; mediocrity, anger, resentment, populism, proudly anti-intellectual, and increasingly bitter. And she was a rock star for it.” – Peter Wehner, veteran of …
Cari Mora Thomas Harris Copyright © Thomas Harris 2019 William Heinemann & Grand Central Publishing You read quickly through the first three chapters of Thomas Harris’ Cari Mora with a slight sense that, gripping and strange as the story begins, it’s a bit pedestrian, not quite on the level of Silence of the Lambs. Then …