Stephen King: Just After Sunset

My new Stephen King book has arrived in the mail and I can't wait to get to it! This one is a collection of short stories, a couple of which I've read already in either Tin House or The New Yorker. I might have to remove the dust jacket though because it hurts my eyes!

I've been reading Stephen King for at least 28 years (crikey - has it been that long!?); I loved The Stand and The Shining. King has a way with words that I find amazing. He is no Hemingway or Fitzgerald, but he never pretends to be. It's just not that kind of writing, and he is the first to point that out. King sort of lost me, though, when we got to Cujo and Christine. That car thing just about irritated me.

I picked him up a couple of years ago when I taught a Creative Writing class; he had published a book called On Writing, about the writing process of course, and I was curious as to what he had to say. He had done another non-fiction book years before called Danse Macabre about the horror genre. That one I didn't like so much. I still have it though, and might take another look at it. On Writing was wonderful though and I used a lot of what he had to say with my class.

I've started picking up his works again and some are good and some not so much. I never bothered with Cell, for example, but totally loved Bag of Bones and Lisey's Story. I thought Lisey's Story was great for its descriptive detail and the fact that the protagonist was a woman. I would think it would be difficult for a man to write from the perspective of a woman.

So now, it's raining outside and I'm dying to crack open my new book, but 65 research papers are beckoning. Maybe I'll grade five, then read a story. Five, story. Five, story. Yeah, that's the ticket!