Okay, this first thing that I want to say for this review is that it contains spoilers. Why? Because I like my friends and readers and DON’T WANT THEM TO SUFFER THROUGH THIS STORY!
A kid passes out at an abandoned rest stop on the freeway from drinking vodka. Meanwhile an apparently alien car rolls into the rest stop and starts EATING PEOPLE.
THE CAR.
IS EATING PEOPLE.
Sound stupid? Good. Because it is. And it’s not even like chomping them up using its hood as a mouth. That, at least, would be entertaining. It just kind of… absorbs them. As it does, it deforms and then pops back into shape with a sound (according to King) of a tennis ball popping back into shape. So apparently it’s a RUBBER alien man-eating car. Jeez.
“Look, Mr. King… I like you. Been a fan every since I first read Cujo in the early eighties to impress a girl. At your best, sir, you write like no one else in the business. Anyone who can read ‘Salem’s Lot and sleep well that night or Misery and not cringe at the hobbling scene or Bag of Bones and not be moved by the ghost’s plight are so cold emotionally that I don’t want to meet them in a dark alley. For my money, the downward slide in quality started with It, and continued merrily with The Tommyknockers. Since then you haven’t so much been “hit and miss” as you’ve been “miss miss miss hit miss miss”. The only one that was so self-worshipping and bad that I couldn’t finish it was Lisey's Story. The truly amazing thing is that, at about the same time, you published the last of the “Richard Bachman” novels, Blaze. In the prologue of Blaze, you actively apologized for the book and dismissed it as a “trunk” novel. If I’m not mistaken, you even wondered in the text why you even bothered publishing it, AND IT IS ONE OF THE BEST THINGS THAT YOU’VE WRITTEN IN YEARS. You’ve really started to repeat yourself badly, as well. What’s Under the Dome but The Stand meets The Tommyknockers? Please. As a fan, I’m begging you. Quit publishing every piece of crap that you write. Start accepting the input of others, and if anyone that you trust thinks that it’s junk, trunk it. You’re rich enough and you’re really tarnishing your reputation with some of this garbage.”
Speaking of repeating himself, some will be tempted to think that this is a reworking of From a Buick 8 (which was a reworking of the earlier and vastly superior Christine), but it’s really more like his short story The Raft where a group of teens are stranded on a raft in the middle of a lake by an apparently alien monster that absorbs them. He even has a female protagonist trapped by the monster getting a hold of her hair.
THE GOOD: I give King huge points for how far he’s come in his representation of gay characters. One of the characters (read as: car chow) in Mile 81 is a lesbian, and she’s one of my favorite King characters probably since the group in The Stand. She is light-years beyond the flaming stereotypes that he wrote in the opening pages of It.
THE BAD: The rest of the story. It ranges from bad to laughably bad. In particular, the car as antagonist. For those who don’t know, King was struck by a van and almost killed in 1999. When that happened, I remember thinking “Man, I hope that he writes about this one day.” Now, after On Writing, and Dreamcatcher, and Kingdom Hospital and now this, all that I can say is “MAN, I HOPE THAT HESTOPS WRITING ABOUT THAT CAR CCIDENT ONE DAY!”
THE UGLY: The main character, who is passed out through most of the story. King has relied heavily on kids in his books. He says that he has the heart of a small boy (in a jar on his desk), but the “small boy” whose heart King claims to have seems to be stuck somewhere between 1955 and 1970. This boy is not believable as a twenty-first century kid in any way. The kid’s older brother even belongs to a group of kids who call themselves the “rip-ass raiders”. Seriously. Do you have any idea how GAY that would sound to a modern kid? Heck, I’m a child of the seventies and that phrase sounds incredibly gay to me. I think that it’s time that he either stops writing about kids or gets to know them a little better.
The bottom line? Don’t read this story. It’s bad. As fans, we need to stop encouraging him so that he can get back to quality writing and quit publishing this junk.
Oh, and don't forget to click on an ad while you're here, will you please?
Peace.
Randal
No comments:
Post a Comment