Rated "Good" in our old book database. ( )

Once again, Stephen King comes through for me. I was so absolutely absorbed in "Under the Dome" from the very beginning and it kept me attention all the way through. In typical King fashion there is a huge host of characters - some you love, some you hate, and some you don't quite know how to feel about. I will be picking up the next part soon! ( )

I’m not altogether sure I know what to say about this book. I wanted something easy and fast to read on a late flight home from a long business trip. I hadn’t read King in a while, and several friends had highly recommended the The Dark Tower series. The airport bookstore selection was sparse, but King’s name stuck out at me and I figured, “what the heck?”

The first thing to say is that I did not immediately realize that this was half of a book that was previously published as one volume. I paid $9 for a paperback that said “Part I” and so naturally assumed that this was a series. When I looked up Part II on Amazon, I found that the full-length novel was published in June of 2013 but that “Part II” of that novel – which I would need to buy in order to finish the thing – won’t be released until March 25, 2014. So this book in and of itself is basically a scam. Why buy one paperback, when you can buy two with the added bonus of having to wait for the second half to be released?!

OK fine, snark aside: The book was a quick read. I was interested in what was happening and the plot arc is strong: similar to Saramago’s Blindness, King paints a picture of humanity’s baser nature that comes out to play in the absence of effective incentives to behave. Unlike Saramago, however, King did not draw me into the horror so much as turn me off with what I can only describe as an inordinate focus on gratuitous sexual violence, described in such overwhelming detail that I would campaign for a giant trigger warning to be slapped on the cover. Again, I have not read King in a while, but I don’t remember this as a feature of his earlier works (I was very into him in the 90s).

Frankly, the upshots are twofold: (1) I won’t be wasting my money on “Part II” of this ridiculous publisher’s scam (I have, in fact, already returned “Part I” to the “read and return” store at the airport), and (2) I’m far less inclined to give The Dark Tower a whirl if this is what I have to look forward to. Ultimately, this was very likely the last Stephen King book I’ll ever read. Shame, that. ( )