End of Watch: 19th - 20th September 2016

Two days!  That's all it took my to blast through this book.  I'll put it down to a combination of being on the finishing straight of this reading mission as much as the book's pace and readability.
I checked out somewhat on the supernatural elements, almost lamenting their inclusion.  But I was happily along for another ride with Bill, Holly and Jerome.

The book didn't fill me with joy, but then neither did a good percentage of King's other books.
I think it's fair to say that there are elements of the detective story genre that King struggled to adopt and his usually tremendous depiction of youth didn't work at all.  The modern, especially technological, references stuck out like turds in a swimming pool, but rather than pick apart what I did and didn't like, I'll just say that it wasn't a waste of time and I didn't spend any of the time I was reading thinking that King could have better spent his time writing something in his usual mould, rather than this detective trilogy (as one goodreads reviewer said).

And that's that.  One more summary post, and I'm done.

Finders Keepers: 2nd - 11th September 2016

I dunno. It was alright. It was a page turner, but the criticisms are easy pickings. As with Mr Mercedes, the villain is way too much of a caricature. Obviously not on the same level as Brady Hartsfield, but he's cut from a similarly perverse cloth.

King's up to date references are still pretty poor. Putting Snow Patrol and cool into the same sentence is a clanging bum note.

I'd been looking forward to seeing how the relationship between the three main characters had evolved, but it was resigned to a subplot that I struggled to care too much about.

The end of the book has me looking forward to the next instalment, but the fact that End of Watch will bring me right up to date on King's work and the opportunity to go to work on my 'to read' pile, may be doing a lot of the heavy lifting on that anticipation.

Mr. Mercedes: 19th - 27th August 2016

I came out of it having really liked Mr Mercedes. For a good part of the first half, it was hard to escape the sense of King wearing the disguise of crime writer. He knows his stuff, so the conventions and whatever else (I'm wholly aware that I don't really know what I'm talking about when it comes to the minutiae of genre and have rambled at some length about my literary and critical ignorance, so you'll just have to take these comments in the same throwaway vein as the rest of this blog) are all there, but so are the cracks. The disguise is ill-fitting at times. As in, he knows what's expected in a crime novel, but when he does it, it just feels formulaic. Maybe I'm projecting this, imposing my stylistic expectations on the book and being wrong footed by any step outside my comfort zone.

Anyway, when it really came to it, it was hard not to get pulled into the plot and into the characters' lives.

It only took me just over a week, so there's that to say for it.

I'm certainly looking forward to Finders Keepers.

But first, there's Revival.