Wednesday, October 18, 2017

New Book: Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Earlier this month, I finished reading The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King. It's a collection of King's short stories, and it was predictably good. I didn't like it quite as much as Night Shift, which I read last fall, but it was still very good.  Not everything is necessarily "horror," but rather there is some horror, some suspense, and some science fiction.  Without giving too much away, here are a couple of my favorite short stories from The Bazaar of Bad Dreams:
-Ur:  A college English professor buys a Kindle and discovers that it contains books and news articles from parallel universes, which becomes an issue when he attempts to prevent a tragedy he learns about while reading news articles from the future about his universe.
-Morality:  A married woman who works as a nurse for a wealthy retired reverend.  She and her husband are having financial issues, and the reverend asks her to commit a "sin by proxy" (although not of a sexual nature), in exchange for several hundred thousand dollars.
-Bad Little Kid:  A death row prisoner the night before his execution explains to his lawyer why he murdered the child that sent him to prison.  But was it a child after all?
-Obits:  An internet zine writer who specializes in scathing celebrity obituaries realizes he may be able to cause living people to die by writing their obits, and then he has to come to grips with how to use his new-found power.
-Blockade Billy:  An elderly former professional baseball coach recounts when, in 1957, both of his team's catchers were injured just before the season started, so the team has to sign a minor leaguer they've never seen, Billy Blakely.  He turns out to be a star rookie, but some odd things happen and we learn Billy's true identity.

Since we're in the season of the macabre, I am sticking with Master of Horror, going with Pet Sematary by Stephen King. It is about a longstanding pet cemetery in a small Maine town that has been maintained by the town's children (hence the misspelling) and that has some mystical powers.  It's one of his classics, but I've never read it, nor have I seen the 1989 movie (or its 1992 sequel, which is not based on the book, but uses its setting).  So far so good.

Books read in 2017:

-X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography by Ray Davies
-Phil Lynott: The Rocker by Mark Putterford
-I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir by Brian Wilson with Ben Greenman
-Trouble Boys:  The True Story of The Replacements by Bob Mehr
-The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King

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