January 2016 Group Read-The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

[Walter]

Tressa wrote: "Walter wrote: "I agree, Tressa. One of my favorite books in my personal library is a collection of her short fiction. :)"

I have one too, a hardback I've had since the eighties."

Might be the same one. Mine is also a hardback, The Complete Stories, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Would have pulled it out to check the publication date, but I was worried I might start an avalanche.

[Jack]

Don't read this if you haven't read Mile 81 in its entirety yet.

(view spoiler)[Just finished Mile 81. I loved the set up, and King's style (this is the first thing I've ever read from Stephen King, believe it or not) - I don't like the 'monster' - you know, the whole squishy metal thing didn't do it for me - a bit too cartoony.

The characters were all great, though

Wish he hadn't referenced a certain of his own other works as a known piece of fiction - as though in the world of these characters there is a Stephen King who writes horror novels. That doesn't sit right with me.

Also the kid says the car can't follow them. Why not? It was moving when it drove up onto the ramp in the first place, why wouldn't it just start up and roar after them.

And the method of chasing this thing away was a bit of a joke (hide spoiler)]

The bits I liked, I loved and that's about 80% of it.

Looking forward to what comes next.

[Char]

Jack, please make use of the spoiler tags. You'll find directions on the top right of the box in which you type.

[Char]

Charlene wrote: "Jack, please make use of the spoiler tags in the future. You'll find directions on the top right of the box in which you type."

[Kimberly]

Just finished BATMAN and ROBIN HAVE AN ALTERCATION last night....(view spoiler)[loved it, but so sad at the same time! (hide spoiler)]

[Brittany]

I've just finished 'The Bone Church'. So far 'Bad Little Kid' has been my favorite. Really enjoying his messages before each story as well.

[Danelle]

I've just started reading it! I bought it a few days ago, and I've read a little fo Mile 81 but I have not had time this week to really sit down and get into it. I love Stephen King and can't wait to be able to contribute more.

[Alex]

Wasn't very impressed with 'Ur'.

[Char]

Read Dune and enjoyed it and I'm reading Bad Little Kid now.

[Jonathan]

Man, I love Stephen King. I don't know if I'll finish my McCammon book in time to start this one with you all, but I'll be reading it soon. King is a master at every length. Accordingly, I always love his short fiction. "The Road Virus Heads North" is still giving me nightmares.

[Jack]

Read Premium Harmony last night. I think I'm the only person in the group who kinda liked it

[Jay]

I liked Harmony okay. Am on Ur now, and... it's definitely a story, I can say that for certain. My favorite thus far is Blockade Billy, which I got as a hardcover a few years back. That copy also had Morality, which I still do not like at all.

[Will]

Finally my copy has arrived, so I can join in.

[Monica]

My copy arrived yesterday, I hope I can start soon

[Lena]

Three people still ahead of me :(

[Latasha]

I'm still waiting too Lena :(

[Walter]

I looked earlier today and saw there were still 63 people ahead of me. Since I still had a B&N gift card from Christmas with some money on it, and I'd finished a BotM with a second group, and only waiting on two people for a third, I bit the bullet and burned the card. After all, I most likely would have bought it one day anyway, eventually.

[Lena]

Ouch 63. Yeah, I've been buying the kindle edition Tower books, which help me keep track of the story, but they are $9. I've been pretty spendy lately on books, lol. Good use of B&N gift card Walter.

[Jack]

Charlene wrote: "Charlene wrote: "Jack, please make use of the spoiler tags in the future. You'll find directions on the top right of the box in which you type.""

Done- sorry, I hadn't been able to change it from my i-phone. Still getting the hang of Goodreads! :)

[Char]

Jack wrote: "Charlene wrote: "Charlene wrote: "Jack, please make use of the spoiler tags in the future. You'll find directions on the top right of the box in which you type.""

Done- sorry, I hadn't been able t..."

Thank you, Jack. :)

Finished Bad Little Kid and loved it, though I did think it was slightly predictable.

[Danelle]

Just read The Dune. I really loved that one. It's my favorite so far.

[Jay]

Am now up to Mister Yummy. Liked Ur, Herman Wouk and Under the Weather were both very, very sad. My reread of Blockade Billy was lovely, as always. It could be I love that one so much because I love baseball, but I think another part of it is, I love King's stories that are told from a side character's perspective, like The Wedding Gig from Skeleton Crew, or Shawshank.
I also really liked Afterlife. It had a nifty premise and an ending that was, to me, both ambiguous and incredibly hopeful, which is not easy to pull off.

[Jack]

Just read Batman and Robin this morning, really enjoyed that one.

[Canavan]

Skipping around a bit. Thoughts on “Bad Little Kid” and “The Bone Church”.

“Bad Little Kid” ✭✭✭✭½

A very good story, although — as someone else pointed out — as entertaining as it is, the author is exploring territory he’s covered pretty thoroughly in previous stories and hence one is able to quickly see where events are heading. (view spoiler)[Two themes that King focuses on in this story that we’ve seen before: One has to do with random way in which terrible events touch upon the lives of the relatively blameless. Hallas addresses this notion at one point, telling Bradley, “If you’re asking why bad things happen to good people, you’ve come to the wrong place.” Second, in this story, as in others, evil rarely dies (if “die” is even the right word to use in the situation described here by King); more typically, even when evil’s progress is halted, the effect is only temporary.

A last comment on the story has to do with the author’s notes. In the notes, King says that he wanted to write about a bad little kid who was “[n]ot a kid who was the the devil’s spawn, not a kid who was possessed by some ancient demon à la The Exorcist, but just bad for bad’s sake, bad to the bone, the apotheosis of all the bad little kids who ever were.” This strikes me somewhat misleading; reading that passage I was expecting a story shorn of the supernatural, but if the bad little kid in question isn’t possessed by a demon, he certainly seems to be some sort of demonic entity. (hide spoiler)]

“The Bone Church” ✭✭½

King, it seems to me, offers a pretty clear-eyed and honest assessment of this poem. It’s not very good poetry, but the narrative embedded in the poem is sometimes interesting. (view spoiler)[I enjoyed most the first part. It reminded of films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Mountains of the Moon — films that in part explore the effect of a harsh environment on man. I found the second part — a kind of riff on the old myth of the elephant’s graveyard — less compelling. (hide spoiler)]

[Walter]

I'm about three stories in so far. Jack, I also liked Premium Harmony. It reminded me of one of Jack Nicholson's best flicks, About Schmidt.

[Danelle]

Morality made me feel weird....

[Jack]

I'm right with you there, Walter. On the story and the movie.

[Jeremy]

I am still pretty excited about BOBD and rereading some of my faves.

[Hudson]

Reading "Obits" now and it reminds me of ”word processor of the gods ”.
Also it occurs to me that King has a thing for advertising men, feel like I've seen that a lot. {that bus is another world” in this book and "cujo" come to mind but I think there are more.

[Eric]

I finished "Afterlife" yesterday as well as "The Death" over the weekend. I LOVED "The Death" and always though King does prison/jail stories well although "The Death" probably can't be stereotyped that way. "Afterlife" was rather humorous. Like James my hardcover years ago of "Blockade Billy" had "Morality" as a bonus story. I think "Blockade" is fantastic but "Morality" was disturbing and not in a good way.

[Char]

I read A Death last night and remembered that I already read it somewhere before. I still liked the ending though, even if it was sort of disgusting.

I tried, but I did not care for the poem.

Morality is up next.

[Danelle]

Starting Ur now. I actually really enjoyed Afterlife.

[Alex]

Danelle wrote: "Starting Ur now. I actually really enjoyed Afterlife."

I liked Afterlife too.

[Canavan]

“Afterlife” ✭✭✭

(view spoiler)[King has typically been rather good with characterization, and one of this story’s strengths are the two believably flawed protagonists, Harris and Anderson. Harris, for example, isn’t portrayed as evil personified, but his manner still makes abundantly clear why he has been consigned to his purgatory-like existence. On the other hand, I found the story’s central conceit — the afterlife as a sort of administrative way-station designed primarily as Harris’ punishment — rather uninteresting. On the other other hand, I think King makes the most of this rather bland premise with a nice ending. As another poster, James, noted (see here), the ending has a certain ambiguity that allows the reader to imagine either a semi-hopeful or a less than sanguine outcome for Anderson.

As King mentions in the foreword to this story, he’s explored the theme of an afterlife in other venues. Off the top of my head, my favorite such treatment would probably be the story, “That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French”. (hide spoiler)]

[Jay]

Finished up today. Overall pretty good, but there were a couple I hated. Luckily they were balanced by a couple I loved. Surprisingly, the second poem is one of the things I loved. It reminded me of a group of friends I hung with, years ago, and the funeral that kind of served as our last hurrah. Bittersweet, but melancholy is something I appreciate more as I get older.

[Canavan]

“Tommy” ✭✭✭

Like “The Bone Church”, not a particularly good poem, but the content did make me reflect a bit which is something, I suppose. (view spoiler)[The 60s cultural milieu features in a lot of King’s fiction and reappears here. The poem functions as an elegy to the fictional title character, a young man who embraced the values of the 60s counterculture and died in 1969 still believing in those ideals. Tommy (and those like him who died young “in those few sunshine years”) are contrasted with their peers who passed through the 60s and later in life seemingly abandoned their principles. I often hear this position staked out by political conservatives, but it’s a little surprising to hear something much to the same effect coming from King — he sounds both sad and a little bitter.

Note: The Wilde-Stein Club is a UMaine gay students’ organization. The group took its name from Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein. King’s research is a bit off since the organization didn’t exist in 1969; it was formed in 1973 and celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2013 (see here). (hide spoiler)]

[Char]

I read Morality last night. Meh.

[Hudson]

I'm done. Overall I liked it, thought it was pretty good.

I still need to know who the kid with the orange hair really was....

[Walter]

Just read The Bone Church. I enjoy good poetry, being a longtime fan of Dylan Thomas, and loved the simile, "[S]he had an ass like an English saddle," to which my subconscious could not help but add, "rode hard and put away wet".

[Walter]

Charlene wrote: "I read Morality last night. Meh."

It felt a bit more than 'meh' to me, Char, but I'm thinking that (view spoiler)[couples who've experienced some serious trauma might have a better take on what can happen when an evil, great or small, drives a wedge between spouses. Usually it's more serious than what happened here, like the death of one's child. Here it's a bit more plebeian, but still serious enough. After all, there's no follow up, and while the liklihood is that the child suffered no lasting harm from what happened, neither one of them really knows that for certain.

There's some intriguing stuff here, just below the surface. The couple experiences some major sexual energy before the crime, implying that despite what they say, the idea of the sin/crime excites them. Then afterwards she needs a purging of the guilt (which might explain why she needs to be hit all the time, though only when she wants it). And he's poisoned by the guilt as well, since his ability to write (a horror King could surely identify with) appears to be permanently compromised by what they did. After all, it was a shortcut to get from point A to point B, and traditionally shortcuts are held in suspicion. What was it Yoda said about the Dark side of the Force? "Easier, quicker, more seductive."

In the end, I think what made this story so disquieting for me was the implication that we can never know for certain what evil seed, whether major or minor, might grow to poison a relationship with a loved one beyond redemption. (hide spoiler)]

[Walter]

Finished "Afterlife".

Don't really have much to say about that one, though I can imagine (view spoiler)[a quantum reality in which time is some oddball form of Möbius strip endlessly repeating itself. (hide spoiler)]

Whenever I think of the possibility of a universe that includes an afterlife, I usually think of two islands. You're born on one, live there for however many years you're given and then, at some point, you're led down to the shore where you're stripped naked and put in a canoe to paddle away, taking nothing with you but your personal history on your journey to that second island, inhabited by everyone who has preceded you.

[Char]

I read Afterlife last night and thought it was just okay. It had an interesting POV, that's for sure. It did leave me wondering which door I would choose.

I enjoyed reading your breakdown of Morality, Walter.

[Walter]

Thank you. :)

[Canavan]

Brief thoughts on “Ur”. ✭✭✭½

I purchased this novella back when Amazon released it as a standalone novella in 2009, but for hard-to-articulate reasons resisted reading it until it appeared in its present, revised form in Bazaar . It turns out to be a not-too-bad story. (view spoiler)[I like the opening section. I found the descriptions of mediocre academia and the fragile relationship between Wesley and Ellen to be quite genuine. For me, the story then loses a bit of steam; it over-relies on two rather pedestrian sci-fi tropes, books that might have been written in some alternate reality (bibliophiles seem to really like this one) and the attempt to alter the future. On the other hand, King does manage to create sympathetic characters, so I nevertheless found myself interested in how the plot would unfold even if the underpinning of that plot was a bit creaky. There is what I initially took as some typical King foreshadowing about the nature of evil (“The evil always survives, Robbie. In all the Urs. Remember that.”), so I was surprised by the happy ending. Final note: quite a few nods to King’s own Dark Tower mythology. (hide spoiler)]

[Robert]

Started the audioook a couple of days ago, since my "eyeball" reading time is going to be taken up with a copyediting job for a while. Just finished "Bad Little Kid", which I think has been my favorite so far, predictable or not. It's nice they got so many different narrators, including ones I really enjoy (like Will Patton).

[Alondra]

So far, so good. Afterlife was a little meh... Morality is disturbing and without morality. By the end, I wanted to slap someone around...

Under the Weather caught me off guard. (view spoiler)[For once; I did not see that coming... how tragic. (hide spoiler)] not sure if that was spoilery.

Ur was a goodie, and I had already read Blockade Billy when it first came out. I actually liked it.

On to Mister Yummy.. sounds good. :)

[Alex]

Am I the only one who didn't like "Ur"?

[Kimberly]

Finished!

Alex: I liked that one for a bit, but it lost it's novelty for me about half-way through.

Overall favorite: Bad Little Kid. :)

[Walter]

Alex wrote: "Am I the only one who didn't like "Ur"?"

I won't say I didn't like it, most likely because I found myself identifying far too much with the English Lit nerd, but the story did take a direction I wasn't expecting. (view spoiler)[I thought King was going to explore the ramifications of a literary aficionado having access to great, but unknown, works of literature. Instead we got a different, more upbeat take on 11/22/63. Not quite what I was expecting. (hide spoiler)]

[Kimberly]

Alex wrote: "Am I the only one who didn't like "Ur"?"

For myself, that one just (view spoiler)[ seemed to go in a direction that didn't inspire me to want to read any more--even though I did finish it. I felt it had "potential" to be better, if taken down a different path. (hide spoiler)]