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htful piece addressing one of the oldest questions how far would you go for the right reward afterlife first published in tin house june 2013 in which william dies at least once a more whimsical tale as investment banker william andrews dies and goes to bureaucratic limbo where he is presented with a choice a fun if lightweight cyclical piece which serves as an excellent palate cleanser between the tales that bookend it ur first published as a kindle exclusive ebook february 2009 in which wesley buys a kindle ur is another story i was already familiar with before picking up this collection having listened to the audiobook reading several times and is for me at least the strongest story here it concerns wesley smith english teacher whose purchase of a kindle is prompted by a break up during which his girlfriend asks why he can t read off the computer like the rest of us upon examining the device wesley finds that it has an unexpected menu which allows him to read stories from other urs dimensions realities of particular interest to wesley is discovering that in other urs hemingway among others wrote different works which have never been seen before however this discovery is tempered when wes investigates two other functions ur news which displays newspapers from other dimensions and ur local which seems to predict the future in this one this is a well rounded satisfying story which as a bonus links back to king s overarching dark tower mythos at the end with a welcome return appearance by the low men in yellow coats herman wouk is still alive first published in the atlantic may 2011 in which a picnic is rudely interrupted phil and pauline both in their seventies both poets are picnicking and reading each other s work meanwhile brenda and her friend jaz along with their collection of kids are drinking and driving wondering how fast their rented minivan will go a question which is ultimately answered before a sudden unexpected stop another one of those stories where the destination is less important than the journey unfortunately for me the journey was about as interesting as the interstate that features in it under the weather first published as a bonus story in the paperback edition of full dark no stars may 2011 in which ellen becomes unwell an unnamed narrator cares for his sickening wife who sleeps a lot in an apartment building which has a curious rotting smell probably due to rats if you ve ever read a story before you will already know what the ending of this one is but that doesn t mean that the tale isn t worth your time predictable and yet well written and touching blockade billy first published as a stand alone novella april 2010 in which the story of a 1950s baseball player is told i had read blockade billy on its original release in 2010 but not since and i didn t remember much about it other than it had to do with baseball revisiting the story five years later i can see why it wasn t memorable it is of course well written but baseball is such a big part of it that i think it loses something when read by non us readers the story itself is pretty simple george grantham third base coach for the new jersey titans relates the history of william blakeley a ball player whose major league career has been expunged from the record books the story hangs on two things firstly the aforementioned love of baseball and secondly the reason why billy s career was forgotten this last could have turned it around for me but ultimately the twist just didn t hold my interest and i was left feeling both disappointed and somewhat cheated mister yummy previously unpublished in which ollie sees a spirit which predicts death yes we re here again another elderly man close to death in a retirement home relates the story of how bizarre things happened to him this time it s a premonition whenever someone close to him is about to die at this point king could put together a collection solely comprised of these old man flashback tales that wouldn t necessarily be a bad thing and this isn t necessarily a bad story but we ve been here before tommy first published in playboy march 2010 in which tommy s funeral is held a highly personal poem in which king reminisces over the funeral of a friend 40 years on the little green god of agony first published in a book of horrors ed stephen jones jo fletcher books september 2011 in which a healer is summoned and summons in return following a plane crash newsome is bed ridden and in near constant pain having tried multiple different therapies he finally seeks help from reverend rideout who offers to literally physically remove the agony in many ways the dark reflection of morality a corrupt man instead of a virtuous one a man who seeks to be rid of an experience rather than have a new one the little green god of agony is clearly inspired by king s own recuperation after his accident in 1999 unfortunately whilst entertaining it falls short of mirroring the earlier story in quality that bus is another world first published in esquire august 2014 in which wilson has a decision to make another slight tale this one of a man who while riding in a cab witnesses a murder on a bus in the next lane the story here however is not the crime itself but rather how wilson chooses to deal with what he s seen another story inspired by a true event although not a killing this is another mirror to morality thematically this time and more successfully rendered than its predecessor obits previously unpublished in which a journalist discovers an unusual and unw anted talent obits is very much a treatise on celebrity obsession our protagonist is an online journalist for a celebrity news site writing acerbic obituaries for dead pseudo celebrities who finds that writing obits before the subject is dead becomes a self fulfilling prophecy in the most literal way one of the most accomplished stories in the collection and also tellingly one of the most recent this tale gives me hope that maybe the best of king s short stories are not yet behind him drunken fireworks first published as a stand alone audiobook june 2015 in which a lakeside arms race is sparked off by a few firecrackers alden mccausland and his mother live by lake abenaki after winning big on the state lottery one july 4 th alden celebrates with fireworks resulting in an annual battle with the shady italian family across the lake an interesting idea which could have led to great things but which ultimately turn out to be a damp squib summer thunder first published in turn down the lights ed richard chizmar cemetery dance publications december 2013 in which robinson s world ends in a manner of his choosing as king says himself in his introduction to this piece what better place to end a collection than with a story about the end of the world set not long after an unspecified apocalypse it finds robinson his neighbour timlin and a stray dog named gandalf the only survivors of a lakeside community another musing on mortality choices and love for a 1986 harley davidson softail it is a pleasant if uninspiring closer to the collection a number of things are immediately obvious after finishing this collection a lot of the characters are older as might be expected from an author in his late 60s and a good number of his tales are now set in florida where he and his wife spend half of each year one other thing is also evident to me this is not the same stephen king who wrote night shift skeleton crew or even everything s eventual this is not the king who told us of eyes growing in the palms of hands shipwrecked surgeons turned auto cannibals and decapitated women giving birth this is the king who tells of old men dying peacefully in their beds and who spins stories where frankly nothing happens the stand out stories here obits ur bad little kid give hope that there may be more quality to come but ultimately the bazaar of bad dreams is merely interesting rather than outstanding steve j shaw is a fan who s not sure how he lucked into the business from his draughty garret somewhere in the kent countryside he has created the most compact of horror empires now comprising one clothing company and two publishing imprints as editor his most recent books are wild things from black shuck books and play things past times from knightwatch press steve can be found online in all the wrong places one of which is his website at great british horror at 09 00 no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels the bazaar of bad dreams friday 18 december 2015 firestarter reviewed by paul m feeney over the last few months i ve had many occasions to ponder the idea of subjectivity versus objectivity where works of fiction are concerned specifically when a particularly contentious book appears dividing opinion and now and again leading to heated debates and arguments and aptly enough this often happens with stephen king s books which is only natural as he is our yes our he is through and through a horror writer most well known author and probably most well read too by others i mean not himself and in many of these discussions arguments the final comments tend to devolve into variations on agree to disagree or well that s just my opinion pointing to an innate inability to present an objective argument against the book or by extrapolation any work of creativity and this would be true if the only thing that were up for debate was the reader s reaction to the work essentially stances of i liked it i hated it and all the myriad shades between these except except writing and reading is or should be i believe so much more than this i d suggest if you are incapable of separating your very subjective opinion of how much you liked or disliked a book from the very real objective practical aspects of the writing itself you re possibly not in the best place to argue your case or are certainly missing out on a large part of the discussion of course the notion of what s good prose itself can be suffused with subjectivity but i do believe you can set baselines for pace rhythm and flow and then there s grammar punctuation sentence structure and so on and a greater understanding of these comes with time experience and reading widely otherwise to say it all comes down to simply a matter of taste you give anything a pass and you are putting the best of fiction and its worst examples on the same footing which is simply ludicrous i ve been misunderstood on this point in the past and while i don t agree that any one person s subjective opinion of a work is more valid than another s at least not where mere opinions of like dislike are concerned it s a massive disservice to the craft of fiction writing to suggest that the practical elements of prose are not just as important as any other aspect that s not to say you can t enjoy something that s perhaps not very well written from an objective point of view and the converse can apply too to give an example i adore the harry potter books but as an exercise in prose writing they do leave a lot to be desired similarly i can appreciate good writing in other arenas but it may be that the story itself is not for me or bores me rigid i ve had this with a few shorts i ve come across and this leads me to king i ve seen king lambasted for an almost infinite variety of fiction sins seen him criticised six ways from sunday i ve even seen someone dismiss him as writing like an amateur and if you knew who that was and saw their work you d choke with astonished laughter at the irony yet aside from the occasional awkward line or clunky bit of prose which we all suffer from from time to time i truly believe king is up there with the greatest writers and my opinion only becomes cemented more and more the more i read of other wonderful writers however that doesn t mean that i ve loved everything of king s i ve read no siree there are a handful of books and stories i ve struggled with but i can say with almost one hundred percent conviction that it was not the writing that was the problem but my response to the story and that ladies and gentlemen lies almost squarely in the province of the subjective all of which and i apologise if i ve bored you thus far brings me to the book i m revisiting here firestarter published in 1980 and coming at a time when king was on the rapid ascent firestarter is one of king s novels that almost exclusively never gets mentioned when discussions of his early classic work arise everyone remembers carrie the shining salem s lot the dead zone the stand even the collection collection night shift gets props and the books that followed firestarter cujo christine and pet sematary are mentioned with equal reverence most of the time yet firestarter tends to be the forgotten one the black sheep of this family i first read it way back in the early to mid 90s and i can t recall much from that reading except that i wasn t impressed at all yet the basic plot sounds right up my street shady government experiments enhanced human beings with almost superhero type powers a frantic chase across the country evil people masquerading as the good guys what s not to love so when the book came up for the king for a year project i thought why the fuck not and here we are i won t go over the plot too much save to say it concerns mainly eight year old charlene mcgee the daughter of two people who got involved in a shady experiment in the 60s trailing an experimental drug that appeared to give both of them psychic abilities their abilities pass on to charlie where it seems to have mutated and grown immeasurably charlie can create fire from nothing amongst other slightly less explosive haha powers the first half of the book has charlie and her father andy on the run from the shop a shady and seemingly untouchable government agency who were also responsible for the initial experiment leading to all this the second half of the book has charlie and andy indefinitely detained in the shop s secret compound while the organisation s scientists experiment on both and throughout all this there are flashbacks and recalled events filling in the blanks if all this sounds a shade unusual for a stephen king book though by this point he had already released three novels where main characters had psychic abilities that s probably because it reads much more like a thriller than a horror in fact there really isn t any horror in this story at all aside from a few violent events and perhaps the threatening shadow cast by the shop and some of its operatives more on that in a mo this impression is bolstered by the opening which puts us straight into andy and charlie s desperate flight it s a move typical of thrillers and action books eschewing a slow build up for fast paced action and peril any character study or back story is thrown in piecemeal with short recollections through andy s memory or the pov deviations to the agent chasing the pair i think this clearly demonstrate...