Adam Nelson > Recent Status Updates

Currently on chapter 23 with Asher.

Fair Extension was excellent. Short compared to the other works in this volume, but its scope was much wider. We're invited to place ourselves in Streeter's shoes and see Tom's devastating misfortunes from Streeter's perspective. Would we feel the same ambivalence if we were experiencing so many blessings with the result that our enemies are equally cursed? It's an uncomfortable position to be in as a reader.

Big Driver was more simple and unadulterated horror--mostly. I could have done without Tess's conversations with her GPS device, her cat, dead people, etc. I think this is because I'm imagining it cinematically, and knowing how King's work often translates to screen, I already see it as being laughable. I know that's a shallow way to look at it, but it was involuntary and took me out of the story a little bit.

I finished 1922 over the weekend. Wow--incredibly gruesome, but classic, simple horror, the kind Stephen King excels at in his shorter fiction. His longer stuff sometimes goes toward the abstract and mystical and you lose sight of the simple appeal to our base fears. Here, however, he stays on track throughout. Readers with a fear of rats beware.