ROAD RAGE (audiobook) by Joe Hill, Stephen King, and Richard Matheson

Published in 2009 by HarperAudio.
Read by Stephen Lang.
Duration: 2 hours, 25 minutes.
Unabridged.

My Synopsis:

In 1971 a relatively unknown director made an ABC made for TV movie called Duel. The plot was simple enough - a traveling salesman is harassed by a semi-truck on a nearly empty desert highway. Spielberg took this opportunity and turned it into the movie that made his career. Now, Duel is a cult classic.

Before the movie was made, there was  the short story of the same name. Richard Matheson wrote the short story and the screenplay.

Joe Hill and Stephen King added a second story called Throttle to this collection. It features a motorcycle gang trying to decide their next steps after a botched attempt to find some missing money that resulted in a brutal murder. Suddenly, a semi-truck catches up to the gang and begins to pick them off one by one.

My Review:

Duel was a very good short story. It draws you in and keeps you involved to the end. 

Throttle is told well, but I found it very hard to identify with any of the horrible characters. The drama is hurt by the fact that I really didn't care if the gang members were hurt.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ROAD RAGE by Joe Hill, Stephen King, and Richard Matheson.

ELEVATION (audiobook) by Stephen King

 

Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio.
Read by the author, Stephen King
Duration: 3 hours, 46 minutes.
Unabridged.

Stephen King has a long history of publishing collections of short stories. I am usually not a fan of short stories, but I have no problem with a Stephen King short story. I think King is so good at making characters that the reader can identify with in such a short amount of time.

This collection is pretty short - just two short stories. Both feature older men.

The author

In one, we have a man living in Maine with a supernatural problem and also a misunderstanding with his neighbors. This one really feels like two stories, but it was pretty touching.

In the second story, a desperately lonely widower living in the Florida Keys is brought a gift by his older sister to get him up and moving again - a puppy.

These are both good stories - very enjoyable and always with a twist. They were read by Stephen King. It was neither a good thing nor a bad thing - his accent was great with the characters in Maine, but he is a good reader, but not a great one. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ELEVATION (audiobook) by Stephen King.

THE LANGOLIERS (audiobook) by Stephen King

 

Originally Published in 1990 as part of the book Four Past Midnight.

Audiobook published in 2016 by Simon and Schuster.

Read by Willem Dafoe.

Duration: 8 hours, 46 minutes.

Unabridged.

More than 30 years ago Stephen King released a collection of four large novellas (each was certainly large enough to be a stand-alone book) called Four Past Midnight. I snapped it up and read it right away because I was an avid fan of King's work at that time and read everything of his as soon as it arrived in my local library. I remembered this story as one that I did not enjoy but I also remembered that they had made a mini-series based on this story so maybe I just missed something. After all, who puts money into making a mini-series based on junky source material?

Simon and Schuster decided to start breaking up King's short story and novella collections into separate, smaller stories a few years back. When I found this audiobook for The Langoliers, I decided to listen to it this summer to see if I had been wrong all that time ago. After all, tastes change and maybe I was wrong way back when.

Short synopsis: a packed plane flying from Los Angeles to Boston flies through some sort of turbulence over Utah. The handful of passengers who were asleep awake to find that the almost everyone on the plane has disappeared. On top of that, they can't contact anyone on the radio and the lights of the towns and cities below are not twinkling. They discuss what could have happened and toss out all sorts of scenarios - Was there a nuclear war? Did the plane land while they were sleeping and did everyone else disembark? Are they part of a psychological  experiment? Did terrorists strike? Are they hallucinating?

They continue on to Boston and what they find is nothing like they had imagined...

Willem Dafoe, the reader

I was heartened by the fact that award-winning actor Willem Dafoe read this audiobook. I recognized his voice immediately and the first few minutes are all told from the point of view of the main character (the pilot). When other characters began to come into the story I thought this was a multicast performance (multiple actors reading the parts of different characters) because Dafoe did a great job of creating distinct individual voices for literally every character. 

But, Dafoe's talents simply could not save this story. It is tedious and has a very unsatisfying ending. It reminded me of a Twilight Zone story - but not the ones that everyone thinks are great. Instead, it is like one of the disappointing Twilight Zone stories that makes you wonder why you spent the last hour watching this show.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Langoliers by Stephen King. 

RITA HAYWORTH and SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (audiobook) by Stephen King

Originally published in 1982 as a novella in the collection Different Seasons.

Read by Frank Muller.
Duration: 3 hours, 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

I originally read this novella when it was published as a part of the collection called Different Seasons more than 35 years ago. This is the third time I have read this story, but the first time in the last 20 years.  I have never seen the beloved movie.

Stephen King

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption tells the story of two prisoners in Shawshank Prison in Maine, starting in the late 1940's. One is the main supplier of things smuggled into the prison (but not hard core drugs) and the other is a banker that has been falsely convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. They are not exactly friends, but they are friendly and they certainly respect one another.

The banker has an odd habit of collecting rocks he finds in the prison yard and carving them into little sculptures - but could it be a sign of something more?

I have never seen the movie because I was always sort of indifferent to the novella. Strange considering that I've read it three times now. I gave it a try this time to see if my opinion had changed. Turns out it hasn't. Frank Muller did a fine job reading this story, but I still have to rate it 3 stars out of 5.

This story can be found on Amazon.com here: RITA HAYWORTH and SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (audiobook) by Stephen King.

In November of 2023 it was announced that the group Moms for Liberty had challenged more than 300 books in Florida. This is one of the short stories in one of the books that the Moms challenged. Read more about the books here.

THE RUNNING MAN by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman

Originally published in 1982.

Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster.
Read by Kevin Kenerly.
Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes.
Unabridged.

Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule of thumb - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that rule would be problematic. This edition of The Running Man includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name.

The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy.

The economy is ruled by a company called General Atomics (presumably a mixture of General Electric and General Motors) and the Games Network. 

Every house, every apartment, every hotel room, no matter how broken down, is wired with a working cable TV system called Free-Vee. The Games Network runs a series of violent, often deadly, game shows that are designed to keep the great underclass entertained and quiet (think: Roman "Bread and Circuses").

Ben Richards lives in a horrible neighborhood called Co-op City. He can't get work because he has been blacklisted for complaining that his job at General Atomics was giving people radiation poisoning. His wife can only earn money through prostitution and they desperately need money. Their 18-month child, the only child they will ever have because Ben is now sterile due to radiation poisoning, is dying from pneumonia. Any decent medicine costs more than they have any hope of scraping together.

Ben decides to try out for one of the game shows. His surly attitude, intelligence and physical stature qualify him for the most lucrative and most dangerous game show: The Running Man. In this show, the contestant becomes an enemy of the state and is given a 12 hour head start before the Games Network releases its crack team of investigators and killers. Anyone who gives the Games Network information leading The Running Man's death or capture will receive a big reward, including police officers. The longer he runs, the more money he makes. If he makes it 30 days, he will receive $1 billion. No one has ever made it more than 8 days, 5 hours.

But, then again. no one's every had to go up against Ben Richards before...

This is a tough book. It is unrelentingly depressing, even for a novel featuring a dystopian future. Ben Richards is an impressive, but generally unlikable character. For me, the most interesting thing was the gradual revealing of the larger setting of America in 2025.

Kevin Kenerly read the book and did an excellent job.

Note: this book does not follow the same plot as the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the same title. That book was the inspiration for the movie, but, at best, you could argue that they could have taken place in the same universe.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here:  THE RUNNING MAN by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman.

Note: In November of 2023 it was announced that the group Moms for Liberty had challenged hundreds of books in Florida. This book was one of those books. Learn more about the list here.

DRUNKEN FIREWORKS (audiobook) by Stephen King

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio
Read by Tim Sample.
Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes.
Unabridged.

Stephen King uses the voice talents of Tim Sample, a humorist that specializes in talking about Maine. Fans of Stephen King know that the prolific author loves to set his stories in his home state of Maine. This one is set on the corner of a lake surrounded by vacation homes.

Two families are part of a year-after-year fireworks contest. One is a family from Rhode Island. The other is an older mom and son who grew up in the area and bought their dream home on the lake. They don't know each other well, but their sense of pride get in the way as their desire to "one up" each other gets more and more ridiculous as the years go along.

The folksy manner of the narrator makes this predictable story a lot of fun. It is the perfect matching of author and narrator.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Drunken Fireworks by Stephen King.

THE MIST (audiobook) by Stephen King

Originally published in 1985 as part of the short story collection Skeleton Crew. 
Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio.
Read by Will Patton.
Duration: 5 hours, 19 minutes.
Unabridged.

This is technically a re-read for me - I read The Mist when it was originally published 30+ years ago. It is such a vivid, tightly written story that it has always stuck with me. In my mind, this is one of Stephen King's better works, even if it is one of his shorter ones.

The story focuses on David Drayton, his wife and his son. Drayton has made a pretty good living as a commercial artist and is able to afford a home on a lake in Maine.

A particularly nasty summer storm has come through Maine in the middle of the night. Trees are down everywhere and, as a consequence, power lines and phone lines are down everywhere. It is important to note that this was written a long time before cell phones.

The radio stations are also down - especially those that broadcast from the direction of a strange, secretive military base. Everyone has heard rumors of the strange goings on there.

The audiobook narrator, Will Patton

A strange fog bank - a mist - can be seen slowly rolling across the lake. It is weird, but Drayton can't worry about it - he has trees to clear and then supplies to pick up in town. He takes his son and they head out.

But, while they are in the town grocery store, the mist catches up with them and everything changes...

This short story (novella?) has clearly had some influence on current popular culture. There was a one season attempt to adapt this story on Spike TV, but I think Netflix's Stranger Things owes a giant debt to this story.

Veteran actor Will Patton read this audiobook. I think he has become the default choice for Stephen King audiobooks as of late and that is fine by me. He performs the books rather than just reading them. He adds to them quite a bit. I think he makes them better.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Mist by Stephen King.

Note: In February of 2023 this novella joined an extensive list of banned books (Ugh) in the Penncrest School District in Pennsylvania. It is included in this database. It also made a list of books banned in Florida for the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to that ridiculously long list of books.

FROM a BUICK 8 (audiobook) by Stephen King

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2002
Read by James Rebhorn, Bruce Davison, Becky Ann Baker, Peter Gerety, Fred Sanders, Stephen Tobolowsky
Duration: 13 hours, 21 minutes
Unabridged

Troop D is the name for the troopers in a Pennsylvania State Police post in western Pennsylvania. They are a close-knit bunch, as you would expect. But, it's not just because of their shared struggles as police officers - they share a secret and it's hidden in a shed behind their post station.

In that shed is a 1953 Buick Roadmaster - but it's not any kind of Buick that was ever built in Detroit. It was left behind at a gas station when its driver stepped out of the car, told the attendant that the oil level was fine, headed towards the bathroom and then literally disappeared.

The car is weird. In fact, it really isn't a car. It can't actually drive. It's almost like someone who didn't understand the mechanics behind a car tried to build one. But, that's not the problem - the problem is that it pulses - it pulses deep sounds that people hear on a subconscious level and it calls them...

From a Buick 8 is, mostly, a series of stories told to the son of a deceased state trooper about his dad's investigations into the car. In that sense, it is a lot of sitting around on the "smoker's bench" behind the station looking at the shed across the parking lot and talking. The stories are strange and rather repetitive, but King's strength in developing believable characters shines throughout.

The audio version was read by 6 different voice actors, each taking a turn (or several turns) at telling stories about the car. They do a great job, as they should since each of them are actors that you recognize from television and movies, even if you don't actually know their names. I really liked that fact that the voice of the original driver of the car sounded exactly like that of Flagg from the audio version of The Eyes of the Dragon.

However, the book suffered from way too much mood-setting and philosophizing and not enough actual action. It isn't until the listener is more than 10 hours into the book that the story actually gets some real "current day" action. I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: From a Buick 8 by Stephen King.

Note: This book was banned from a school library in the state of Florida in the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to a story about this extensive list of banned books. UGH! 

THE EYES of the DRAGON by Stephen King

Originally published in 1984.
Published by Penguin Audio in 2010.
Read by Bronson Pinchot.
Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes.
Unabridged

The ancient kingdom of Delain is ruled by a good king, but not a great king. He is a widower with two sons and an ancient, yet seemingly ageless, magician adviser named Flagg. His oldest son is Peter - a son who shows all of the signs that he will be a great and good king in the future. His youngest son is Thomas, a young man who is a lot like his father. Thomas is very jealous of the well-deserved attention lavished upon Peter and often turns to his only friend - Flagg.

Flagg is very powerful, long-lived and an omnipresent dark force in the royal palace. In reality, he is more than a mere magician, he is a malignant force that seeks to create chaos and disorder above all else. Flagg is a frequent character in Stephen King books, most notably in The Stand and The Dark Tower series. This book is his second appearance in King's work.

Flagg poisons the king and frames Prince Peter for the regicide. Peter is sentenced to live in a high tower the rest of his life and the young and woefully unprepared Prince Thomas becomes King. Flagg advises Peter and steers the kingdom on a course that will lead to chaos and civil war.

But, high up in his tower, Peter has a plan...

The author, Stephen King

This book is different than the majority of King's books, being an epic fantasy rather than a horror book. It is also presented differently as well. This book has a narrator that acts as a storyteller that often speaks directly to the reader as though we were all sitting around a campfire or a hearth on a cold winter's night. 

The audiobook is read by award-winning narrator Bronson Pinchot. When I say that it is read, though, I am not doing his work justice. He doesn't just read this book. He performs it. He screams, he cries out, he laughs. His characterization of Flagg is so creepy, so scary, that it makes the character emerge fully formed in the listener's consciousness. At the end of the book, when Flagg's true nature is shown to everyone, his screams, his anger, his unhinged-ness (if that is a word) are captured by Pinchot perfectly. 

This is not a perfect audiobook - the story simply lags at too many points for that. But, it is a good story and it is well worth it just to hear Pinchot's audio performance.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: THE EYES of the DRAGON by Stephen King.

DOCTOR SLEEP: A NOVEL (Sequel to The Shining) (audiobook) by Stephen King

A Tour De Force

Published in 2013 by Simon and Schuster
Read by Will Patton 
Duration: 18 hours, 35 minutes

I am an occasional reader of Stephen King. When I was younger I used to be an enthusiastic fan of all things Stephen King, but I took a break (about 15 years) and have slowly come back to the Stephen King fold, picking through some of what I missed, listening to his short stories as audiobooks and sometimes reading a book as it comes out. In this case, I am very glad that I did not hem and haw over this one. It is a tour de force of how to write horror, human frailty, human resilience and the power of friendship and love. Throw in the amazing performance by reader (and veteran actor - he is the coach in high school football movie Remember the Titans) Will Patton and this audiobook is an experience that must not be missed.

Stephen King

Doctor Sleep is the sequel to the classic novel The Shining. I read it many, many years ago and decided NOT to re-read it before I listened to the audiobook. If you have not read the book in a while or even just saw the movie, King provides enough background material for the reader to piece it together.

The child protagonist of The Shining, Danny Torrance, returns in Doctor Sleep. In his author's notes after the book King notes that he is often asked what he thinks happened to the kid from The Shining and he found himself wondering how he character would react to the horrific events that happened in the book.  He has .psychic powers that his mentor called "the shining." Danny can see certain spirits, he can tell when someone is going to die and he can communicate with only his mind if the other person also has "the shining."

Having this talent takes a tremendous toll on Torrance and, like his father before him, he turns to alcohol to quiet the voices and dull its abilities so that he can sleep. Soon enough, like his father before him, he becomes a violent alcoholic who cannot keep a job and he just rolls from town to town, getting work when he can and moving on when the alcohol gets in the way. He hits a low point when he wakes up in a stranger's apartment after a one night stand and he steals all of the cash from her purse even though he knows she has a little boy in diapers. At least he moves the cocaine out of his reach before he runs off with the rent money!

Dan ends up in New Hampshire and meets a couple of older gentlemen. One offers him a job, the other introduces him to Alcoholics Anonymous and helps Dan get sober. Dan eventually gets a different job at the local hospice and he uses his special talents to help dying guests pass over easier. He earns the nickname Doctor Sleep because word of his talent spreads among the residents and nurses of the hospice. The three scenes in which King describes what Torrance does with these patients as they pass away are quite beautiful.

What Stephen King does best is create characters. Dan Torrance is described in such approachable detail that the reader (listener, in my case) feels like he is real. At his lowest, the reader feels a level of both pity and disgust for Torrance. But, as he begins to pull his life together the reader feels like Danny is redeemed in some sort of way. I felt like I had been to the bottom with Torrance and had now come through the worst of it. This would have been a great story if this is all there were.

But, Stephen King does not leave it there. He makes you love a character (or a bunch of them) and then he makes you worry over them as horrific things come at them from all over the place and try to kill them. 

In Doctor Sleep the monsters are a group of psychic vampires called the True Knot. They travel the highways of America looking for children with "the shining." They capture them and slowly kill them and absorb their life essence as it slowly ebbs from their damaged bodies. They can live for hundreds of years and they look the same as everyone else. They have also targeted a twelve year old girl who lives in a town near Dan Torrance's and when she contacts him he knows that he must confront an evil that he has never imagined.

Will Patton

Will Patton read this book. Saying he read this book is really an insult to what he did with the material. A great audiobook reader can turn so-so material into a good story. A good story can make a so-so reader sound good. In this case, Patton is an amazing reader with an excellent story. Patton performs almost every sentence of an eighteen hour plus audiobook with such skill, such a solid feel for the story that I can honestly say that I have not heard anything better in ten years of listening to audiobooks. I have reviewed almost 250 audiobooks and I can unequivocally say that this was the best performance I have ever heard on an audiobook. The accents, the pacing, the nuances were all perfect. Whether he is voicing an elderly black man from Florida or a crusty old New Englander or an evil woman who likes to torture young people for their souls or a middle school girl or an old Italian grandmother or a panicked small town mom - he nailed it. 

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Doctor Sleep.

Reviewed on November 3, 2013.

Disclosure: I was given a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. 

NOTE: This book was placed on a book banning list for the state of Florida in the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to that extensive list.

It was put on a book ban list in Tennessee, too. The article has a searchable database because the list has more than 1,100 unique titles.

Ugh.

UR (audiobook) by Stephen King

My new favorite Stephen King short story

Published by Simon and Schuster in 2010
Read by Holter Graham
Duration: 2 hours, 20 minutes

Normally, I am not a fan of short stories - they end just about the time I get comfortable with the story. But, Stephen King has a gift for short stories. He is able to get the reader comfortable with the characters very quickly and pack in a lot of weirdness very quickly. I can get tired of Stephen King in the novel format, especially in audiobook format where they books can last longer than 50 hours! But, Simon and Schuster's decision to issue his short stories as short audiobooks is perfect for me.

UR is the story of a small college Literature professor named Wesley Smith who decides to buy a Kindle after experimenting with a student's kindle. When this book was written, the only choice in Kindles was the Kindle 2. It came in off white, had no color and 5 years ago it was top of the line cool technology and I have one.

The author

Wesley's Kindle is pink so he knows that there is something a little weird about it  they're all supposed to be off-white. The Kindle 2 has a menu choice called "Experimental." The Experimental setting has a few choices like internet. Wesley's Kindle has even more choices, including one called UR. And, once Wesley starts experimenting with the UR function, nothing will be the same again...

I liked Holter Graham's low-key reading of this short story. It hit the right note for a story about a low-key man whose life is in a bit of a rut and who loves books more than anything else.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: UR by Stephen King.

Reviewed on May 22, 2013

Stationary Bike (audiobook) by Stephen King

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2006
Read by Ron McClarty
Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes

I am not sure who the person was at Simon and Schuster Audio that decided to record Stephen King's short stories, like Stationary Bike as separately packaged stories, but I think it was a stroke of brilliance. I am leery of listening to a 30-40 hour audiobook for a taste of King's special brand of story-telling and I am equally leery of a short story collection - I get tired of mentally shifting gears so often.

In this short story, Richard Sifkitz is an overweight graphic artist (he specializes in book covers and advertisements) who was told by his doctor that he needs to lose a little weight and eat better because his cholesterol is too high. The doctor compares his cardiovascular system to a road maintenance crew and says that Sifkitz is working his crew to death and soon enough it will start to fail.

Sifkitz resolves to work out and buys a stationary bike. He paints a simple painting of a landscape on the wall as well. Soon enough, he begins to fall into some sort of trance as he rides and it seems like he is actually riding into the landscape he has painted - and what he finds there is a definite surprise! Note that this is not a "horror story" so much as it is a story with a twist, much like The Twilight Zone.

Stationary Bike was read by veteran reader Ron McClarty who covered all of the characters well and helped to make this an enjoyable audiobook experience, despite its short length. His conversational reading style reinforced the idea that Sifkitz is just a regular guy with an extraordinary story.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Stationary Bike

Reviewed on April 12, 2013.

The Gingerbread Girl (audiobook) by Stephen King

A short story: dramatic, gory, creepy and quite satisfying.

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2008
Read by Mare Winningham
Duration: 2 hours, 13 minutes

Unabridged.

"Run, run, as fast as you can
You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!"

Some time back some brilliant someone in the vast Simon and Schuster bureaucracy (I assume it is vast. I guess it could be just some guy named Simon talking to some guy named Schuster all day long but it seems much bigger to me) decided that Stephen King's short stories would make nice little audiobooks. That anonymous, faceless cubicle dweller was absolutely right. Here's the deal with Stephen King and audiobooks - he tends to write long books and that means you are listening to one story for a long time. For example, the audio version of The Stand lasts 47 hours and 52 minutes. Two complete days of a tale of woe, disease, mass death, chaos. I listen in the car so that would mean a solid month, maybe more. Can you imagine what that much Stephen King do to your brain? I shudder at the thought.

Stephen King

But, two hours of Stephen King? Get in, get out and get a little taste of what he has to offer. Yeah, I am in for that. This is my fifth Stephen King audio short story. It is probably the weakest, which means that it is merely good and well worth your time if you like gritty thrillers.

The Gingerbread Girl features Em (Emily), a young wife who has suffered the loss of her daughter to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). The death has had a dramatic toll on her marriage and she and her husband have drifted apart. There is no pathetic affair on his part - the marriage just fell apart after their daughter's death. This is King at his best. He creates characters that are believable and situations that command instant sympathy from the reader.

Em deals with her daughter's death by running. She has never been a jogger or a runner but now she runs. She runs with passion, but not out of sport. She runs as if she is punishing herself for the death of her daughter. She runs until she falls down and then she gets up and runs some more. Understandably, her husband is concerned but he deals with her in a way that shows the love is really gone from the marriage so she moves out to her father's vacation home on an island filled with vacation homes off of the coast of Florida. It is an isolated place because it is off season and she runs and runs and runs up and down the beaches until she is finally starting  feel like she has gotten it out of her system.

And, that is when the bad guy steps in. I remember reading an article by Stephen King in which he comments about his short stories. He doesn't plan on them being short, they just turn out that way. The story doesn't expand in his mind like the books do. This story could have expanded quite easily but it would have been fluff that got in the way of the real story.

Em is warned by the friendly drawbridge keeper who operates the only bridge to the island about her neighbor, a wealthy man who has brought a series of  young women to his house over the years but they never are seen again. Supposedly, they all left the island by way of his yacht, but the drawbridge keeper has his doubts.

Within 10 minutes of audio listening, Em encounters her neighbor and anyone can see where it is going to go, which is probably why Stephen King did not even bother to stretch it out into a novel. But, as a short story, it is dramatic, gory, creepy and quite satisfying.

Two time Emmy Award-winning actress Mare Winningham reads the story with a great deal of empathy, which makes the horrific aspects of the second half of the story all the more powerful.

Click here for the link to The Gingerbread Girl at Amazon.com.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

Reviewed on June 13, 2012.

Roadwork (audiobook) by Stephen King (writing as Richard Bachman)

A story of a man whose world has fallen apart

Published in 2010 by Penguin Audio
Read by: G. Valmont Thomas
Duration: 9 hours, 40 minutes.

Unabridged

Way back in 1981 Stephen King released Roadwork under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Bachman was the name King used to sell pulp fiction type stories so that he could afford to pay his bills and not hurt his reputation as he waited for his work he submitted under his name to take off. King opens this book with an interesting introduction that explains his rather complex relationship with his pseudonym.

Roadwork, on the surface, is simple enough. A man in this forties is losing his house, his job and the memories that he holds dearest to the expansion of a highway through his neighborhood. Due to imminent domain, Barton George Dawes will lose his last connections to his son who has died three years earlier due to a brain tumor. He will lose the house that he and his wife scraped and scrimped to buy. He will lose his career at the local laundry and the memories of the brothers who loaned him the money to go to college so that he could help them with their family business. His son is gone, the laundry has been swallowed up by a large corporation (he manages it for them and they show little interest in the business), his wife has become less of a friend and lover and more of a roommate.

Basically, Dawes' life has fallen apart and he is angry about it. Very angry.

Stephen King

Dawes refuses to look for a new place to live, even though the rest of his neighbors have sold out and moved on. He refuses to search for a new location for the laundry. Instead, he quietly goes behind everyone's backs and purchases weapons and contacts a local mobster about buying explosives so he can blow up the highway.

As a forty-something myself, I found myself sympathizing with Dawes to a point. Dawes has invested everything in a life that has come to nothing - no family, no job, not even the house he has worked for all of these years.

G. Valmont Thomas did a remarkable job of voicing Dawes, his internal alter-ego (Dawes often talks to another person in his mind) and the supporting characters in this tragedy. There is no great moral in this book,  no happy ending. It is a tragedy in the original sense of the word - everyone can see it coming from a mile away but what can a man do when he has nothing left to lose?

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: Roadwork

Reviewed on April 6, 2012.

Blaze by Richard Bachman (Stephen King)

Blaze is Stephen King's twist on Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."

Hardcover edition - published June 2007 by Scribner.
285 pages.

Stephen King and DWD's Reviews have had an "on again off again" relationship. 25 years ago I read everything the man wrote and very much enjoyed it. It is one of my favorite books. But somewhere around Insomnia I got very tired of the Stephen King train and I got off for about 15 years. I picked up Cell at the library and I enjoyed it. Since then, I've done a little more Stephen King reading (and audiobooks) but not a lot. I've missed a lot of his books and will slowly work my way through many of them. I always enjoyed his Bachman books - Thinner and The Running Man have stayed with me for decades (especially The Running Man - King predicted reality television even better than he would have imagined way back when) so I picked this one up at a local bookstore and decided to give King another whirl.

Stephen King

Blaze can be summed up in just one phrase: "What if George and Lennie from Of Mice and Men moved from the Steinbeck novel to a Stephen King novel?" Of course, this world will be even darker than Steinbeck's world (which was dark enough) and our two main characters are not goodhearted day laborers, one worldly and one mentally retarded, trying to make their way through the world, they are con men and car thieves trying to make that one big score.

Bachman/King's book is much more detailed that Steinbeck's tiny classic, but it is every bit as interesting. This is an enjoyable, yet sad book that goes into the detail of Blaze's life (Blaze is the nickname for the Lennie character) and his attempt to follow through with a rather complicated kidnapping of a baby even though George died several months earlier. Blaze hears the voice of George in what I would assume is a personification of Blaze's own thoughts. Or, since this is Stephen King, it could be a ghost of George. It is never made clear.

It is an engrossing book that has the reader ironically pulling for a kidnapper. It is also a story of multiple "What ifs...?" at several points in Blaze's life. King is at his character-creating best in Blaze (I think that he gets overlooked for his ability to create rich and full characters) and when the book ends by a river in an homage to the ending of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. King acknowledges the inspiration in an entertaining introduction ("...kinda of hard to miss," he notes on page 4) and he also includes a short story first published in 2006 called Memory at the end of Blaze.

I rate this novel 5 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Blaze by Richard Bachman (Stephen King).

Reviewed on December 30, 2011.

Note: This book was banned by a school district in Florida in the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to the extensive list of books that were banned in Florida that year.

LT's Theory of Pets (audiobook) by Stephen King

Funny story with a grisly ending.

Read by the author, Stephen King
Duration: 1 hour.

Read by Stephen King at a live performance in the UK, LT's Theory of Pets is an entertaining short story about a couple with two pets - a cat and a dog - and what the fact that family pets tend to actually prefer one member of the family over the others.

LT is a friend of the narrator of the story - they work at the same packing plant in Iowa. LT's wife left him nearly a year before and LT has become quite adept at telling the story of how his wife left him and why she took their dog with her and left the cat with him.

LT's telling of the story is quite funny. His wife's "Dear John" note she left him on the refrigerator the night she left him has to be the funniest Dear John note ever written. LT's observations about pets and married life are quite funny.

The end of the story has a hurried feel to it. King prefaces the story with a short introduction in which he notes that this story started out completely humorous but veered into scary, like a lot of his stories do. Personally, I think King did not know how to end the story so he headed for his familiar territory of the gruesome and the macabre.

Stephen King

Nonetheless, this is an entertaining listen. Stephen King reads his story very well and the funny parts of the story really shine. His distinctive Maine accent make it an even more interesting listen to this Midwesterner.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: LT's Theory of Pets.

Reviewed on July 28, 2011.

Blockade Billy (audiobook) by Stephen King

Two short stories about the dark side of human nature

Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster Audio. 
Read by Craig Wasson and Mare Winningham
Duration: 2 hours, 40 minutes

Unabridged

This audiobook is actually two short stories. The first and longest story is called "Blockade Billy" read by Craig Wasson, the second is "Morality" read by Mare Winningham.

****

"Blockade Billy" is the reminiscences of a retired coach of the fictional New Jersey Titans, an American League baseball team. The coach is being interviewed by a man named "Mr. King." We never hear what Mr. King asks, only the story of a former player named "Blockade Billy" as told by this old coach who lives in a retirement home.

Stephen King is at his descriptive best in this story as he re-creates the world of 1957, when baseball ruled the sports pages. At times, it is like listening to Bob Costas or George Will, both writers who can wax on eloquently about this golden age of baseball (George Will actually gets a not very kind mention by the coach) which is much to King's credit. Due to his reputation as a producer of gore and horror stories, it is easy to forget that King can be a powerful, first rate author.

Stephen King

Blockade Billy is actually Billy Blakely, a catcher that was called up from the Iowa Cornhuskers, the Double A farm team of the New Jersey Titans on an emergency basis. No one expects much from Billy except that he not mess up too bad. Talking with him for even a couple of minutes and you realize that something is not right - no one can figure out of he is simple minded or maybe even crazy. However, when Billy takes the field everyone knows that kid can do it all - he hits, he fields and he even calms the high strung star pitcher - and he does it with confidence. He quickly earns the nickname "Blockade Billy" - the catcher who won't let any player get by him when there is a play at the plate.

But, the head coach starts to believe that Billy is sucking the luck out of the team and when they discover Billy's true story the coach is more correct than he thought...

****
"Morality" has a less detailed plot but it is a detailed study in guilt and what it does to people.

Chad and Nora Callahan are a married couple living in New York City. He is a teacher but can find nothing by substitute teaching work. He is also working on a book about his experiences being a substitute that seems to have some promise. His wife is a nurse who is working with a retired minister named George Winston who has had a stroke. It is steady work but their combined salaries are not quite enough and they are slowly going bankrupt. They are pinning their hopes on Chad's book, if he can find the time to get it done before their finances fail them.

One day Reverend Winston makes a proposition to Nora. He has never committed a major sin and now he is physically unable to do so. He is not interested in a sexual act, but he wonders if she would commit some sort of violent act (nothing permanent - it is a physical assault on a child in a park) on his behalf for $200,000? He figures that this act of "sin by proxy" will actually be doubly sinful since he has corrupted her as well. He preys on her fears of financial loss and on the promise of her husband's book, if he just had the time that the money will provide to finish it.

She decides to do it and discovers that this one act has major, life-changing implications.

I rate the combined set of stories 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Blockade Billy by Stephen King.

Reviewed on July 23, 2011.

Note: This book was banned by a school district in Florida during the 2023-2024 school year. Here is a link to the extensive list of banned books.