Full Throttle

Joe Hill's newest short story collection, Full Throttle, is as eclectic and fast-paced as 20th Century Ghosts.  I think that 20th Century Ghosts was among my favorite books that I read last year.  That book is chilling and thought-provoking at the same time.
This collection has some great high-points, but there are also some stories that left me wanting a little more.  Hill proves that he is a writer who thinks about process every bit as much as his father, Stephen King, as he provides both an introduction to the collection and notes to each of the stories.  In some ways I liked reading about Hill's relationship with reading and writing and the way that he thinks about process even more than some of the stories.  It is clear that he knows his influences and is a very conscientious artist.  The clarity that he brings to these explanatory notes borders on some of the best writing advice that I gleaned from King's On Writing. 
Rather than bumping through each of the stories, I am just going to hit upon a few that I liked the most and/or struck me in some way.

Probably my favorite story of the collection is "All I Care about is You," a futuristic, sci-fi story about a girl who pays for a robot companion on her birthday.  The story hits a lot of notes that I really like in sci-fi: the world is lived in and shows signs of wear, it is not enamored of the future and isn't afraid to show some of it's ugly parts.  For whatever technology may bring, there is still unhappiness and disappointment in the world.  For an author, like Hill, who is not primarily a sci-fi writer, this is a profound stroke.  There is a great turn in the story that I don't want to ruin here, but the interplay between the girl and the robot, and in particular the way that Hill writes the robot's simulated sincerity is very deep and well written.

"Late Returns" is ostensibly a story about a man grieving the deaths of his parents while working through a change in his life, taking a job driving a bookmobile.  But this story is also about the relationship that readers have to their books and the way that they can draw us and touch us.  This is something of a ghost story, but played in a low-key way that is very reminiscent of the story "20th Century Ghosts" from the book of the same name.  In both stories, Hill draws a line from aesthetics to life and death that is fascinating to consider. 

"Faun" is a great adventure/fantasy story with another good turn.  Hill shows his skills with classic mis-direction and connects folklore with a critique of privilege in a not-overbearing way.  This story has great momentum and offers compelling character studies of two of its key players.

In addition to all of the stories that work really well in this book, there are two that fell flat for me, and both because of the structure/conceit because there are great core ideas behind them.  The first, "The Devil on the Staircase," is written in "staircases" instead of paragraphs.  The story is pretty good but the structure is jarring and makes it difficult to read.  The pages look like those that a terrified Wendy Torrance finds in Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.  In the note to this story, Hill bets his reader that they have never read a story written this way before.  True, I haven't, but that isn't enough to recommend it.

"Twittering from the Circus of the Dead" is similarly bound up in its conceit.  The entire story is written in tweets from a teenage girl on a family road trip.  The family stumble into a circus that contains real zombies.  Again, this is a neat story, but the structuring makes it difficult to read and, ultimately, doesn't add much to the story itself.  I would rather have read a more straight-forward narrative that was peppered with tweets, or one that was more thematically about social media than just the structure.

The remainder of the stories are good and vary in their depth.  The collection, overall, is a quality one and worth the read, however, I would still rank 20th Century Ghosts a little higher.  I still have not yet read one of Hill's novels, though I have a couple of these on my next up pile.

Doctor Sleep

I missed this book when it first came out a few years ago but came across it during the recent promotional campaign for the movie.  This book fits in with so many other of Stephen King's books for me: I like the story and the characters but they are just too long. 
This book is a sequel to The Shining in the sense that it picks up Danny Torrence's life as an adult.  He continues to shine and he has come to deal with both that and the problems that plagued his father.
We learn that he has been able to deal with some parts of what happened at the Overlook, and others he has had to lock away from himself in his own mind.
This book encapsulates something else about King's books that has become more apparent to me as I have gotten older.  King is interested in family legacy and the things that we seem to have thrust upon us.  Danny is an alcoholic like his father, and this has long been a theme in King's work.  But there is more.  Danny, now "Dan" as an adult, also has to deal with his own anger and find a way to reconnect with people.  He talks a lot about his mother and he thinks about Dick Halorann a lot.  The book is as much about his need to get out from under what happened to him when he was young as it is about anything.  He does this through the main action of the book, which is something that is unrelated to The Shining and not something I really want to get into here. 
Doctor Sleep is about dispelling the notion that there are things that are inevitable.  Dan sees signs of his own death at one point in the novel, but he is able to dodge his demise.  The novel deals more directly with alcoholism than some of King's other work, giving the reader some AA aphorisms and narrating meetings that Dan attends, as well as defining his relationship with his sponsor.  The elements of AA that seep in walk a line between individual choice and inevitability.  As it is presented in the text, AA is about staving off the inevitable, and accepting that for paradox that it is. 
I don't think that there is really a good comparison with The Shining in this novel.  The books are too different and are trying to do different things.  The Shining is a tighter novel, but it is also a less skillfully executed novel.  It requires a different sort of imagination than Doctor Sleep does because King seems more likely to fill in the gaps in his later work than when he was a younger writer.  His early novels left spaces for the reader to fill with their own fears.  More recent work seems to define the unknown a bit more.  This is not a judgement either way, just an observation. 
I have not yet seen the movie adaptation of Doctor Sleep, but am curious to see how it translates to the screen.  Adaptations of King's novels are always a mixed bag, but the quality of them has improved over time.  The last big question for me, though, is how an adaptation of this novel will stack up against Stanley Kubrik's adaptation of The Shining.

Unfinished Reviews, Part 1

What follows is a partial review/reaction to Stephen King's novel Revival that I wrote shortly after reading it when it came out in 2014.  This is unfinished for a variety of reasons but I like it because I muse a bit on the development of my reading life and the damage that high school English classes caused it.  Luckily, I was able to recover with the help of some great college professors who were more inclined to read books the way that I wanted to.

Revival, by Stephen King

As a young reader I took book suggestions from anyone willing to give them and I read nearly anything that seemed at all interesting.  It wasn’t until I was in high school that I began to learn that different authors were held in different esteem based on their perceived position along the “literature-pulp” axis.  This meant that I read an awful lot of genre fiction and novels that I was later taught were less worthy that what I might be reading.  High school was a horrible period in my reading life because those AP English classes encouraged me to look down on some books and authors, many of which are actually quite good, and work to dig the worth out of some boring books considered classics.  To be fair, there were also a lot of books that I hated in high school but have come to truly love on second readings.  

My early years in college continued in a similar vein and I stopped reading a lot of authors I enjoyed because they didn’t write the right kind of books.  It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, pursuing my Master’s in literature that I lost the last vestiges of this non-sensical way of reading literature.  I finally shook off the last bit of guilt I felt for reading horror, sci-fi, and crime books.  This happened when I re-read Stephen King’s The Shining.  The novel had its moments and was enjoyable overall.  But this isn’t about that book.

The book I recently finished is King’s 2014 novel Revival.  This novel blends elements of Lovecraft and Frankenstein with a coming-of-age/redemption story.  Jamie Morton, the narrator, relates the story of his relationship with Charles Jacobs, a one-time reverend who is obsessed with a secret occult power source that he discovers.  Jacobs draws Morton into his life at several points, at one time curing him of his heroin addiction using the secret power, and becomes more drawn into his secret researches all the while. Jacobs is a character like many in horror/sci-fi who is drawn to the sublimity of the unknown.  He finds a little-explored corner of knowledge that hints at bigger secrets to be discovered and begins to uncover an even greater power source beyond his control. King takes a play from Lovecraft’s book and sticks mainly to Morton’s reactions of terror than to the actual images of horror.  This keeps the horror more subjective and leaves more up to the reader to imagine.  

Revival is not my favorite King book.  I think he could have shaved off about 30% of the text and been left with a better novel.  A lot of Morton’s narration about his own life seems unnecessary and I spent a lot of time wanting to get to the main line of the story instead.  Morton thinks he is telling the story of Charlie Jacobs and his obsession with secret electricity, but he manages to get a lot about himself into it as well.  A bit more balance on this score would have made the book more enjoyable to read.