Jake Epping is an English teacher in Maine. He teaches GED classes in the summer and he gets an essay from the school janitor who is in his class that breaks his heart. The janitor’s name is Harry Dunning and the essay is about a horrible event on Halloween when he was 9 years old and his father came home in a drunken rampage and slaughtered his whole family with a big sledge hammer. Harry was in the bathroom and when he came out, he saw the carnage and narrowly escaped getting killed himself. Instead he was wounded in the leg and had a head injury that made him a little slow mentally. Epping couldn’t believe what he was reading and talked to the janitor. They went to Al’s Diner and Al put Harry’s picture up on the wall of fame in the diner. A few days later Al told Jake that he needed to talk to him.

In the pantry of Al’s diner was a portal to the past, September 1958 to be exact. Al had accidentally discovered this and was buying meat cheap in the 50′s and bringing it to the present and selling it cheaply. This concerned the townsfolk and rumors started flowing that he sold cat burgers or something. Al also had concocted a plan that he wasn’t able to carry out, but asked Jake to do in his place. That plan was to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from killing President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Al had a lot of convincing to do before Jake decided to try the portal and walk around Lisbon Falls in 1958. Once Jake had done that, Al then had to convince him to try to carry out the plan. Jake agreed, but first he wanted to see what happened when he changed the past and he knew Harry Dunning’s family would be murdered in a month at the end of October. He was going to try to stop Frank Dunning first. One thing I forgot to mention is that every time Jake or Al or anyone uses the portal time resets and it is like nothing happened. So if Jake killed Frank Dunning and went back to 2011 and then went back to 1958 again then he would have to kill Frank all over again. Needless to say, it is not until about almost halfway through the book that Jake Epping finally makes it to Texas.

When he does make it to Texas, he decides that he can’t stand Dallas and moves to a small [fictional] town called Jodie where he becomes a substitute teacher until they talk him into a year of being a full time English teacher. Jake has taken the pseudonym George Amberson and he becomes beloved at the school doing the school play and several assemblies and changing the lives of the kids at this high school. Meanwhile he is also talking trips to Dallas and Ft. Worth to tail Oswald, bug his home, and find out what he’s doing. While in Jodie, he falls in love with Sadie, a new librarian from Georgia. This is all I’m going to say about the plot so as to avoid spoilers.

Like a lot of Stephen King books, this was a fun one to read. There were some interesting tidbits in the novel as well. When Jake travels to Derry, Maine in 1958 to stop Frank Dunning, Stephen King makes some references to his earlier novel It where a clown is killing children in 1957. In this book, the townsfolk of Derry are still trying to get over those murders. Also in the Audible version, Stephen King himself reads the Afterward and credits his son, author Joe Hill, for helping him come up with a better ending. I really enjoyed the story and, without giving anything away, thought it was really interesting what effect Jake’s actions in the past had on the present day.

I rarely ever re-read books, but maybe I should after 15 or more years have gone by. The last time I read Firestarter was when I was in high school and reading it again now was like reading it for the first time; I forgot so much of it. Back in high school I was on a huge Stephen King kick and read everything of his I could get my hands on. I still enjoy his novels, but I have widened my reading habits to many other authors. Now I was reading this on the iPhone and the iPad in iBooks.

In college Andy McGee wanted to make some extra cash so he took part in a psychological drug experiment headed up by one of the professors in the Psychology department named Wanless. Another student who decided she was going to make some extra money was Vicky who would later marry Andy. The experimental drug was called Lot-Six and it had some horrifying effects with some of the students. With Andy, it gave him the power to “push” people. He could use his brain to push someone into doing something that he wanted them to do. However, any push would be followed by a debilitating headache. Vicky got a minor power of being able to close a refrigerator door from across the room, but that was the extent of the drug on her. Who it really affected was Charlie, their daughter. Charlie had pyrokinesis or the ability to start fires just by thinking about it. Whenever she got upset something would light up. The parents kept fire extinguishers all over the house when she was a baby. They eventually scared her enough into not using the power kind of like toilet-training a toddler.

However, the government agency known as “The Shop” that did the experiment are now after the family, and in particular Charlie. Now we have a good guys (Andy and Charlie) on the run and eventually fighting the bad guys (The Shop) story. After eluding the Shop guys for only so long there is a confrontation at the Manders farm and Charlie really shows what she can do. Flames go out in every direction, the cars explode, the chickens at the farm go up like popcorn and several people get burned alive. From there Andy and Charlie head to Vermont but the Shop agents get smarter too and take Charlie out with a tranquilizer dart from a long distance. From there Andy and Charlie are captured and taken to the Shop compound in Virginia. The rest of the book details the tests that go on there and the eventual plan of release.

I thought this was a fun book as most Stephen King books are plus it was a very quick read. Some things are a little dated as this book was written in 1980, but the story still holds up.

Stephen King has written some long books in his career, most notably The Stand.  At over 1000 pages and 35 hours long for the audiobook (which I listened to), Under the Dome can join those ranks.  I’ve been listening to this book since December and last night I finally finished it.  Like most Stephen King books it doesn’t start picking up the pace until three quarters of the way through it. The beginning is all set up and with a whole town full of characters as are in this book there is a lot to set up.

As you can guess from the title, a mysterious glass dome has completely covered the Maine town of Chester’s Mill.  The dome is completely clear and when it falls, a man giving flying lessons to a woman in a Cessna-like plane crash into it killing them both foreshadowing a bigger and more devastating plane crash outside of the dome later in the story.  Birds line the edges of the dome where they have flown into it and have been crushed to death.  The dome goes several miles into the air and deep under the ground.  It also has an effect on people where the touch it for the first time they feel a big electric shock and then every time they touch it after that they are fine.  If someone has a pacemaker or a hearing aid they are dead on contact with the dome.

The hero of the story is Dale Barbara or “Barbie” for short.  He was a sergeant  in Iraq who got a job as a short order cook at the local eating establishment Sweet Briar Rose.  He got in a fight with the town hoodlums including Junior Renny, Mel Searls, and  Carl Thibodeaux (spelling may not be right as I listened to the book and didn’t read the pages) in a bar parking lot. Barbie was leaving town on foot after the fight when the dome fell and he was trapped in town.  Meanwhile Junior  has these horrible migraines caused by a brain tumor and he murders two young girls in this house and they become his “girlfriends”.  Junior’s father James Renny is the major villain in the story. Big Jim Renny is a used car salesman and the town’s second selectman.  He has also been involved in a huge national Meth ring.  The police chief Randolph is worthless and cowers to Renny letting Renny basically run the town as a dictator when the dome falls.  Renny hires his son Junior and the other thugs involved in the fight with Barbie as police officers and this is the beginning of Chester’s Mill becoming a police state with much similarity to Nazi Germany.

The book then turns in the direction of a good and evil story under the dome with the good side being Dale Barbara and his friends including Julia Schumway, head of the newspaper, and Rusty Everett, the medical assistant, who becomes main doctor when the doctor dies.  The bad side is the new police force, Big Jim Renny, and his cronies involved in the Meth ring before the dome fell.

I found this book to be an entertaining and interesting character study of a trapped town.  Several themes stood out for me such as the corruption of power, how easily people can side with the Big Jim to the point where people are wearing blue handkerchiefs tied to their arms as armbands, and then when we find out the origins of the dome the theme shifts to shameful things everybody has done sometime in their lives.

At the end of the book is an author’s note where Stephen King says that he first started writing this book in 1976 and could only get about 70 pages into it.  He went back to it again in 2006 and started over from scratch, but keeping the same opening idea that he had way back then.  I thought that was really interesting.  The reader Raul Esparza did a really good job of capturing the personalities of the many different characters in this book.

I remember hearing about this short story when Amazon first released the Kindle.  Stephen King basically wrote a story for Amazon showcasing the Kindle.  The story is about Wesley who is a literature professor at Moore College in Tennessee. Moore is a mediocre college and Wes is a mediocre professor.  Wes just had a major fight and broke up with the girl’s basketball coach Ellen.  Ellen had had a bad day with a student and Wes was buried in a novel not paying any attention to her when she wanted to vent.  Ellen told him that he should just learn to read off the computer like everyone else.

One day while teaching a class, Wes notices a student come in with a new device.  He’s about to tell the student to put it away when the student, Robbie, tells him that he has the assigned book on it and it is an e-book reader, the Kindle.  Wes is intrigued and based on what Robbie tells him and what Ellen told him when they broke up, he goes on Amazon and buys a Kindle.  In the next couple of days he receives it in the mail and it is pink.  That’s not the only strange thing because he soon finds out in the experimental section of the device these things called Urs.  He soon finds out that an Ur is an alternate reality and there are millions of them.  He searches Hemingway in Ur Books and finds out the death date of Hemingway is not right, he lived a couple years longer. He also wrote some books that Wes or his colleague Don Allman had never heard of and they are literature scholars.  They go crazy searching for more authors and finding more books that have never been written.

Next he discovers Ur Local which is local news in the future and discovers something horrible is going to happen to Ellen. This encourages him to try to change the future, Paradox laws be damned.  I won’t reveal any more other than to say it was a fun story, typical Stephen King writing and just a joy to read.  As far as I know it is only available on the Kindle, Kindle iPhone app, or now the Kindle PC application.

Zombies spawned from cell phones, what could be cooler than that? The action starts almost immediately, and is violent, bloody, and fast. Before you know it, the zombies are everywhere. I couldn’t put this book down.

The story line is a simple one. Clayton Riddell is coming back home from an interview, which went well. He stops for a moment and gets in line to buy an ice cream. Then, all hell breaks loose. People go from normal to psychotic in seconds flat. No one sees it coming. All Clayton can figure out, at first, is that everyone who has gone crazy and homicidal had a cell phone. The people are still alive, but are suddenly acting more like zombies. They aren’t the slow, stupid, lurching zombies, either. No, they are fast, as in the remake of “Dawn of the Dead” kind of fast. Perhaps because they are still alive?

From there, the story is about survival. What do you do, when surrounded by what is basically a pack of zombies? Where do you go? Clayton must make some quick decisions. Cell isn’t simply about avoiding death by fast moving monsters. It also touches on what happens to people’s minds when they are dropped into this horrific situation. Who do you trust? How can you tell who is safe, and who is going to become violent? How do you figure out what caused this, so it doesn’t happen to you? Makes for a tense story. King excels in mixing psychological and physical horror. Just when his characters think they have things figured out, the zombies change. They act differently, and seem to be getting “smarter”.

Then there’s the moral dilemma. Is it right to kill off these zombies, in order to save not only yourself, but also the other, still unaffected, “normal” humans who are left? I mean, they are still people, right? They are alive, aren’t they? Or, have they stopped being “people” once they lost their minds and got all bloodthirsty? Staggering.

The only thing I didn’t absolutely love about this book was the ending. King doesn’t simply tell you if a particularly important action by the main character worked, or if it didn’t work. The book ends just as Clayton is doing the action. I was kind of mad, because I wanted to know for certain one way or the other. Instead, King has left it unclear. Either he wanted the readers to decide for themselves what should happen next, or, he is leaving room for a sequel to this story. I’m hoping for a sequel, but not exactly holding my breath.

The back of the book says that Stephen King does not own a cell phone. Neither do I. I hate them. I hate when people use them while driving, as they swerve into my lane and almost hit my car. I hate when people come into my retail job, ask me to find them something, and can’t manage to stop their conversation on the cell phone long enough for me to figure out what exactly it is they are looking for. I hate that they force me to be rude, and interrupt their conversation just to provide the help they asked me for in the first place. I hate the T.M.I people, who shout “too much information” across stores and restaurants, because the person on the other end of the cell phone has a bad connection, or is in a noisy place, forcing us all to hear about someone’s surgery, or the night someone drank too much. But mostly, I hate that we have become a nation of people who feel the need to isolate ourselves from the possibilities of having a random conversation with other passing humans. People now seem to feel like they must be constantly connected to this security blanket that “wireless” provides. It sickens me when I see a room full of people out somewhere for a night, all chatting away… to people who aren’t even in the room, instead of with someone who is actually standing next to us. Perhaps, King felt some of the same things I do, and that’s what inspired this book.

If you are a Stephen King fan, you will love this book. It’s just that special. If you are a fan of zombies, and like stories that include them, don’t pass this one up! If you hate, hate, hate cell phones, as much as I do, you will get sadistic pleasure from this book. I highly recommend it.

This book is one weird Fairy Tale, from start to finish.

Lisey (which we learn right away rhymes with Ce Ce), is a widow. Her husband, Scott, was a super popular writer of scary and strange fiction books, who had millions of fans, many of whom were insane. Remind you of any real life writers? At the beginning of the book, Lisey is just starting to go through her husband’s things, deciding what to keep, what to send away, and who to send these important things to. Its been two years since her husband died, and Lisey is being bothered by fans, colleges, and anyone else who feels they are deserving of Scott’s papers, awards, etc. There is also a madman who couldn’t care less about Scott’s things. He just wants to cause Lisey pain.

There are at least three timelines running through this story. One is the present, where Lisey is at now. One of her sisters has gone crazy, and Lisey and the rest of the sisters are picking up the pieces of that. At the same time Lisey is dealing with and running from the madman who is after her. Another timeline is Lisey remembering moments she spent with Scott, both good ones and bad ones. At first, its difficult to keep track of how all these memories fit into the story. There is a specific memory involving a shovel that becomes very important. I don’t think I am giving anything away there. The dust jacket of the book has a cut out in the shape of a shovel, after all! There is a third story line that tells some absolutely horrifying things that Scott went through as a young child.

Weaving through all of these timelines is a connection to…. well, I guess it is another world. Scott can go there, but he’s not the only one. This world has wonderful things, and monsters, and some things that start out wonderful but become dangerous at night. It’s a fairy tale like world, that draws people in. I found a lot of it to be something a young child might imagine. Lisey must remember what she knows about this other world to not only save herself, but, to find her story.

I am a big Stephen King fan, but, I am not exactly in love with this particular story. It just didn’t do it for me. I don’t know exactly why that is. Perhaps it was because I could make out the path the story was leading the reader down a little before it got there. Maybe it was because I ended up wanting to know more about this other world when I got to the end of the book. I had all sorts of questions in mind, that won’t get answered. I think I also wanted to find some link between this book and some of his other books, since I know King has a tendency to connect characters and settings from his other work. If there is a link, I simply didn’t see it. King has a tendency to use made up language in his books sometimes, and I have come to expect that. In this book, however, he goes a bit overboard. I understand that most long term couples tend to have a few words of their “own”. Words that mean something different for them, or words that are completely made up. So much of that gets used in this book that I found it distracting! The use of the word “Smuck” instead of the similar sounding swear word was particularly vexing to me.

Then again, this particular Stephen King book was on the Barnes & Noble Bestseller list for a few weeks. So, what do I know?

I was a little surprized when this book appeared on the shelves at my bookstore. I mean, I’m a big Stephen King fan, and I hadn’t heard much about this book. Besides, I kind of thought he was done after the Dark Tower Series. I did remember hearing something a few weeks before about some book King was working on, and a contest that would allow the winner to name a character in the book, or something like that, but I didn’t hear anything beyond that.

And here was this little book. It has a pulp fiction like cover, with a girl in a red dress. It was small. Downright tiny compared to most of the rest of King’s work. It was even over in the Mystery Section! Could this really be the same Stephen King?

I started reading the book, and was pleasantly surprized to find that I liked it! Its definitely a mystery. In fact, it seems to be part of a series of “Hard Case Crime” with each story by different authors. I was certain it was the same Stephen King right away. It takes place in Maine, as did so many of his other stories, and there is just something about the characters and the writing style that had King all over it.

The story is basically one converstation between two old friends who run a small newspaper and a much younger intern who has worked with them for a while and wants to stay in town. The two older guys are teaching her the trade, and also teaching her about the instincts that a good writer needs when following a story. They bring up an unsolved case that happened in town many years ago. A man is found sitting on the beach, already dead, with nothing more known about him.

From there, it gets stranger as the plot twists and turns. I liked it because I like Stephen King’s work, and because the story keeps moving along. If you like to watch tv shows like CSI, you will like this book.

This was also a fun book to be reading right before and on Halloween. It has fourteen little short stories, all written by Stephen King, and all very much in his style. I happen to be a Stephen King fan, so I really enjoyed this book. Some of these stories link up with his other work,(some of the books in the Dark Tower Series), which is always interesting.

Even the cover is great! Its this pencil drawing of a table at a resturant. The water glass has a red drop of liquid falling down to the bottom of it, which just must be blood. The back cover of the book has the rest of the resturant, and has blood spattered all over it. This artwork is on the hard cover version of the book. Im not sure what’s on the paperback. This drawing is directly related to one of the stories in the book, “Lunch at the Gotham Cafe”, a really gorey story about a guy going crazy at a resturant.

Not all the stories in the book were wonderful, but most were good. My favorite is “Little Sisters of Eluria”. It is almost like part of the Dark Tower series, which I love, but takes place before the first book. Roland goes into this abandoned town, called Eluria, and things happen from there. Its just as captivating as the rest of the Dark Tower series. Also interesting is that this story seems to link up with something in the book “The Talisman”, (which King wrote with Peter Straub). Fans of King will enjoy this story.

The story that the book takes its title from, “Everything’s Eventual”, is a story that reminds me of part of the Dark Tower series as well. But, even if you have not read the series, you can enjoy this one. A teenager, whose life is going nowhere, finds he has a strange power, and gets offered an even stranger job. A good read on its own.

Overall, there were more stories I liked in this book than ones I didn’t like so much. This is a good book when you want to read a Stephen King story, but don’t have that kind of time. Bite sized horror, to be enjoyed like the little “fun size” candy bars one gets while trick-or-treating.