That said, there’s a revelation about the face of Jaime’s father that feels like one of the few missteps in the book. I was reminded briefly of the showdown in Doctor Sleep for some reason. The penultimate claustrophobic chapters melt away as the tables turn on Jaime’s aggressor, get turned back again, all before spinning their way towards the inevitable. The cracker of a finale also feels like the culmination of several recurring motifs King has been carrying around. Suffice it to say that there’s a couple of gasp moments and some knowing winks at the reader from Maine’s bestselling author. It’s not my place to spoil it for you here, with the book still so fresh on the shelves. It’s also several hundred pages shorter than either tome!įor Constant Readers, and even us Inconstant ones, there’s a lovely plot thread that references one of King’s more famous works. If you like The Talisman or It, there’s a good chance you’ll like there. In the true style of hard-boiled fiction, there’s characters you simply won’t you won’t like, but the primary narrative voice is ultimately closer in tone to King’s collaborations with Peter Straub. Thematically following The Colorado Kid and Joyland in King’s Hard Crime novels, this actually lands somewhere between King’s boys-own adventures and a ghost story. What neither of them suspect is that the killer may not be going quietly into undead life. Liz, a detective and sometimes lover of Jaime’s mum, blackmails Jaime into helping her pursue a killer. Of course, as you’ve probably guessed from the Hard Case Crime logo on the cover, things go horribly wrong. The mock cover for the novel written from beyond the grave. (In a parallel world, someone is sitting down with the ghost of Stephen King to find out if Roland ever got to the Tower). When the highest selling client of Jaime’s literary agent mother suddenly passes away, Jaime is able to use his talent to illicit a final novel out of him. The ability he mostly keeps secret allows to talk to the recently deceased, a group who have no choice but to tell him the truth. In LATER, Jaime Conklin sees dead people. Which isn’t unusual for a writer most closely associated with the genre, but the cool-as-hell Paul Mann pulp cover may need some contextualisation. “This is a horror story,” our narrator informs us in his apologetic introduction. One plot strand involves eliciting the plot of a final book out of a recently deceased writer. Now almost 22 years later, King has (whether consciously or not) worked elements of that real life incident into another work. His comeback involved the completion of three Dark Tower books, even writing his near miss into the narrative. We almost lost Stephen King back in 1999 to a car accident, and due to a painful recovery his writing career almost came to a halt as well.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |