Tuesday, March 11, 2008

the King is back

I am about ready to delve back into Stephen King’s work again. I have Skeleton Crew at home and just ordered Danse Macabre from the library. Also on hold at the library are Duma Key and his forthcoming short story collection Just Past Sunset (to be published in November)

What I really appreciate is that King apparently collects every piece of fiction he has written into his collections so that if I read all of his collections I’ll have read 99% of his short fiction. I’m sure there are some exceptions out there, but not many. I checked my King list and saw a collection called Six Stories. This was a limited edition collection, but five of the six ended up in Everything’s Eventual and the sixth in Hearts in Atlantis, so I’m set there.

The only work of King’s I don’t expect to be able to find is his unfinished serialized online novel The Plant. Maybe it’ll show up in a collection in the future.

I have 58 books on the Stephen King list. I’ve read 19 of them. All in the past two years. I’m getting there.

2 comments:

RobB said...

Gotta love those "reading quests" to gobble up everything written by one author. I've read probably 90% of King's stuff; his writing was very influential to me from the time I was reading it in junior high school.

While I enjoy most of it on the whole, I really think he has trouble writing Science Fiction (Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers, and From a Buick 8.

Joe said...

I'm going mostly chronologically on King, so I haven't hit those novels, but that doesn't surprise me.

I loved The Long Walk.

But, I've been through a variety of reading quests in the past years, most notably Octavia Butler. Now that was some good reading.