Welcome everybody to my home.
It's Wednesday night.
It's book club.
It's Wednesday night book club.
I'm your host Andy Rice.
Part of fried rice podcast.
Let's get fried with me as always is no one today.
It's just me.
Just me today.
I'm reviewing the newest Stephen King book.
You like it darker stories.
May 2024.
This thing just came out a few weeks ago.
It's a short story collection with a secret sequel.
Super excited to read it because Stephen King of course is my favorite author, which is
something I always struggled with saying, you know, and I always thought that there
was some, I don't know, some sort of stigma, I guess you could say against Stephen King
where it's just kind of popcorn novels, you know, just like your standard run of the mill
kind of stuff.
And I think the only reason people think that is because there's so many popular movies
based on his works.
So yeah, if you judge it off the movies, then yeah, there's some popcorn, you know, just
like whatever mindless horror movies.
But when you take a step in to the novels and all the multiverse that he's created in
his own world, it's all connected.
I mean, not all of it, maybe all of it.
I don't know.
Most of it, some of it, a lot of it.
It's connected.
The Dark Tower series, which took him 40, 45 years to write.
Ended up being, you know, like crossing all of his multiverse.
And you see that, you know, it's all connected in some weird ways.
But this is a short story collection.
It has 12 stories.
It was, let's see, it's not his, it's, he comes out with, he comes out with books like
a lot.
He's not slowing down anytime soon.
He came out with If It Bleeds, another short story collection on April 2020.
And after that, I know he's come out with Fairy Tale, which was amazing.
And that's one of his more recent novels.
And If It Bleeds also has a continuation of the Holly Gibney Chronicles, which started
off all the way back in Mr. Mercedes, which if you have not read Mr. Mercedes, please
go read Mr. Mercedes.
It is a phenomenal trilogy that Stephen King wrote that introduces Holly Gibney in a way
that makes her now this amazing standalone character with her own, her own books.
You might be familiar with The Outsider.
That was a show that came out.
That's her sort of solo, her first solo book.
Well, she was sort of a side character in that, like she shared the spotlight.
I would say Holly, which is her short story in, I mean, I think actually that's a whole
book, but that's a, that's a great, that's a great one too.
Anyway, getting back to the book.
So sorry, rambling.
No one's here to stop me from going on these tangents, but I'll try to keep this short.
I'm just going to give you guys a brief sort of impression, maybe, maybe a breakdown of
each of the, each of the stories.
There's a few that I liked quite a bit.
There's some that I absolutely loved, but then there's also, which is surprising when
it comes to Stephen King, there's a couple I didn't care for.
And I'll tell you why.
One of them, it's not necessarily it's a bad story, but I just feel like it's been done
before.
It's a little controversial in my opinion, but we'll get there and we'll see what happens.
These have been published before, some of them, and I will let you know which ones have.
So opens with two talented bastards and that's sort of just a, it's like a cool talking about
these two, these two old guys and, hold on one sec.
Something's happening with my computer.
One sec, put in some pause.
I'll be right back.
Okay, I'm back.
Sorry about that.
So where was I?
Oh yeah, right at the start.
Two talented bastards, guys talking about his dad and his uncle who both became extremely
successful pretty much overnight and his dad, I think his dad tells him that they went to
this cabin when they were younger.
Him is the dad and the uncle and they came across an alien.
They saved her life.
Try to at least with, you know, just by doing CPR or whatever and she died.
But then another alien shows up and he's like, hey, you guys did what we, you know, we didn't
expect humans to do.
So they give them this device.
The two of them, I think they blow on it because air was the gift that they gave the aliens.
So the alien kind of gives them a gift that gives them air and they both get their dreams.
Their dreams come true.
One was already an artist, one was already like a struggling writer and then they become
extremely successful overnight.
And after telling the son this, the son, they tell him like, hey, we left it there in the
cabin.
No one's really been out there.
So the son goes out there and it's got this really kind of sad ending where he picks it
up and he blows on it and it kind of moves, but then doesn't open because he's either
not worthy of it or it just doesn't pass down between generations or whatever.
But he doesn't get his powers.
It's pretty sad.
Pretty good.
Pretty good novella.
I like it.
It's one of the longer ones and it's very interesting.
You know, the second one is called the fifth step.
And this is actually one of the ones I had an issue with.
So the fifth step is about an old man who's sitting on a bench.
He has a, you know, he's just minding his own business, doing his thing.
He's kind of, it's not really like a friendly old man.
He's just kind of not grumpy.
I don't know, but he just keeps himself whatever.
A younger guy comes up, sits down next to him, says, you know, hey, can I sit here?
And there's, you know, all these other benches open, so he automatically isn't into it.
But then the guy goes, please, there's something I need to, can I please, you know, talk to
you for a minute?
And he, you know, pulls out some money.
He's like, I just need to get some things off my chest or whatever.
And the old man hesitantly agrees.
And this guy proceeds to tell him that he's an alcoholic.
You know, it's led to violent issues in the past.
You know, like he used to beat people up when he was younger and he turned to alcohol and
he's now in the 12 step program.
And the fifth step is to confess to a complete stranger, all the bad shit that you've done.
And he, so he's confessing all this.
And at some point he starts thinking, well, the, you know, it's like, so then I started
thinking, what can I do?
You know, either instead of drinking or just, he started thinking about when he was, when
he was younger, the feeling he got from beating people up.
And so he ends up killing somebody.
And so he tells the guy, the guy's like, what, what the fuck?
Like, why are you telling me this?
And the guy's like, because I just can't stop myself.
And he pulls like a knife out and he's like, the problem is I always get to this part and
here, you know, I ended up doing this and he ends up stabbing the old man to death in
the, at the bench and then leaving, which is a great idea for a story that they did
in the TV show, Psych about, I don't know, 10 years ago, eight years ago, however long,
you know, season five or six of Psych came out.
So yeah, there's a musical episode of Psych.
We just did a musical episode of the podcast.
That's why it's fresh in my mind, but it definitely opens with an old man sitting on a bench,
feeding some, some pigeons.
A young man comes up to him, confesses a murder.
And when the guy goes, why are you telling me this?
You don't even know me.
The difference in this is he goes, well, I do know you.
I've been watching you from my window at the asylum across the street this whole time.
You just come here, you're alone.
And I also am telling you this so that you'll understand what I have to do next.
And then it cuts to the lead detectives, Sean and Gus, along with Lassiter and Juliet, and
they go to investigate the disappearance of the man.
He ends up not being murdered, spoilers, but still basically Stephen King took, I mean,
now I'm not going to presume Stephen King's a fan of the TV show Psych.
Maybe he's never seen it.
It's likely he's never seen it.
This is a cool idea for a story.
It's possible that two people had the same idea at the same time.
In fact, Stephen King's own book Under the Dome came out the same year as the Simpsons
movie and they're both, they both have the same plot, just giant dome over a city.
Just being what causes the dome and how the civilians inside react.
But yeah, so, and that, but those came out in the same year.
So I mean, like there's no, obviously no, he couldn't have copied that.
You know, they were like within months of each other and he was already writing, it's
a long book.
There's no way he just cranked that out after watching the Simpsons and thought, Hey, that's
good.
I could probably make that a notebook.
No, but this one, I don't know.
He saw and he's like, maybe I could do that.
I could do that and I can make it darker and actually kill the dude.
So anyway, that's a, the fifth step lower on my, on my list because as I was, as I was
reading it, I thought that that was going to be the ending just because that was in
my mind from the musical thing.
And when it ended up happening, I wasn't surprised.
So the next one we have Willie the weirdo.
It's another short story.
This is about a kid who is a, he's just this weird little weird kid who has a weird grandfather
and his grandfather lies about being in like the civil war, world war two.
Like he just, he's just a liar, but the kid loves him and loves listening to all of his
stories.
And one day the grandfather dies and this kid's like weird, like he has no reaction
to death or whatever.
So when the grandpa dies, he's in there.
He like wants to watch his grandfather die and the grandfather at the very end, and he's
got this thing where he rubs his finger across his nose, like underneath his nose or whatever,
like right above his lip.
But he doesn't like all the time.
And the kid, he leans in close and the grandfather takes him and blows this like death breath
into Willie and Willie ends up when he walks into the next room, you see him rubbing the
top of his, the top of his lip underneath his nose, just like his grandfather did.
So I'm pretty sure he got possessed by his grandfather, which very cool.
I like that one.
It's short.
It's fun.
It was, oh yeah, by the way, fifth step was March, 2020 in Harper's magazine and Willie
the weirdo was in McSweeney's 66, spring 22, 2022.
All right.
Next up is Danny Coughlin's bad dream.
This one's fucking awesome.
It's a guy who has a dream about a body behind some like kind of vacant little property and
he can't get out of his head.
He sees it so clearly that like the next day, it's not just some dream that goes away.
And so he does some Googling.
He does some research.
He ends up finding this place on Google, like images or whatever.
And so he goes to the place because he can't get this out of his head and he finds the
body.
And so what he does is he goes and buys a burner phone from like a local little store,
whatever calls the body in and then goes, uh, and then like goes about his day, I guess
immediately the cops find out like who he is and they are on him hard throughout this
movie.
So this movie is like about, uh, sorry, uh, there's this book novella in this novella.
He's getting super harassed by the police.
Now the problem is, is that on one hand, like, like it makes sense.
Like that the police would like, yeah, if you call in the position of a bot, like the
location of a body that you say you found in a dream, then yeah, I would hope to God
that police would fucking come down on you and come down on you hard.
I hope that they would just do everything they could to get your sadistic ass back and
in, you know, put you in prison.
The problem is this is a Stephen King book.
So technically, you know, being sort of some of the supernatural elements that he's capable
of, then you might believe that Danny Coughlin had this dream.
And so, uh, he gets harassed, he gets harassed.
There's this one cop, there's like two cops that are working together.
One of them has this, uh, mental disorder that I've never heard of.
I forgot to write down the name of it's called like number, like new, uh, it's something
about where you have to add things together in a weird way.
So like one chair, two chairs, one and two is three chairs, uh, and then three, uh, minus
two minus one.
It's like, it's a whole, like, I don't know.
It's like a whole thing.
It's like a step to like make them calm down or make him more insane.
But anyway, he makes this dude's life a living hell.
It goes way too far, way too extreme.
I won't give away the ending, you know, see how it ends, but it's, it's good.
And if it's about police brutality.
Oh no, it's about police bullying.
The next one is about police brutality.
Uh, so that was Danny Kaufman's bad dream.
It was one of the longer ones previously unpublished just for this book.
Uh, all actually all the novellas are.
So the short stories have been published other places.
The novellas are all unique for, uh, you like it darker by the way, you like it darker is
a play on the, um, Oh God.
This is named Leonard, uh, Leonard Cohen song.
You need it darker or you want it darker or yeah, it's, that's a good song by the way.
You want it darker.
I'd suggest listening to that after listening to this.
If I can't, I'll try to put like two seconds of it at the top if you want, or if you want
if I want the next one is Finn.
Finn is a dude who has extremely bad luck his entire fucking life.
And one day that bad luck hit some hard, uh, where he bumps into a guy who's running while
sort of wearing the same outfit as him.
Cops roll around the corner, pick him up and then torture him trying to get information.
It's fucking brutal.
It's uh, definitely, it's definitely hard to read at some points.
He gets waterboarded.
Uh, he gets like a lot of the, um, that like when they play the music at him and stuff,
um, but yeah, anyway, he gets, uh, he gets free by some of the dudes that were, uh, working
for the guy.
So I guess it wasn't really the cops.
It might not have been the cops actually.
I think I was just maybe because I read it right after reading the other one.
So yeah, they, uh, he gets free, but it like, it sticks with him.
Um, and that was one of, that was a, again, it's just like a little short story.
It was, it was quick.
Uh, but it's, it's pretty funny.
I liked it.
On slide in road, which one was that one again?
That was, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was where they, this family is driving and they see up on the, uh, they're, they
hit up like their car falls into a ditch or whatever.
Cause the road is fucked up.
And so they, well, the kids, uh, while the, while the parents are trying to work out how
to work, how to move the car, do whatever, the kid, the two kids, they run up to this
like abandoned hotel or whatever.
And they meet these two young guys.
These two young guys, uh, are skeez balls and these kids, one of them sees the like
feet of a, of a dead woman down at like the end of a pit.
And these two dudes know that these kids saw.
So they kind of follow them down to the, where the car is.
And this again, this is out of the middle fucking nowhere.
So it's these two guys, one of them pulls out a gun, tries to rob or robs them.
Now the, it's, it's the dad, it's the mom, it's the two kids and it's a grandfather.
Grandfather, he is a fucking bad ass.
He lies to them.
He tells them, uh, you know, like I've got a bunch of money in the trunk of the car.
He opens up the trunk of the car, he pulls out a baseball bat instead, fucking whoops
one of the dude's asses.
Uh, but the dad, when he tells the dad, he's like, all right, go get the, get the gun or,
you know, do whatever.
Fuck it.
The dad does nothing.
Um, he just stands there doing nothing.
He's ineffectual.
So the, instead the boy ends up helping out and they end up like disarming them.
They end up, you know, getting out of the situation.
But one of the best things is when he's leaving, the father just looks at his son, just fucking
disgusted with him, just disappointed with him.
Like you failure, your, like your son had to do your fucking work for you.
You disgust me.
It's kind of hard like to, like to read that one a little bit because it's like, damn,
you know, it, it happens, right?
And you just, sometimes people freeze up.
It was sad.
Um, so, oh yeah.
Then there's a red screen.
It was a little bit, I didn't really care too much for this one.
I think it was just, uh, they, something about aliens, they get the red screen and then it's
like, they don't know who each other are.
Um, and then I think at the end, it kind of, uh, it shows one of the characters was, was
one the whole time, sort of like invasion of the body snatchers type thing.
It's, it didn't stick out of my head.
It's a short story.
I, maybe I have to reread it to kind of fall into it again.
There's another one later, Lori, which I also didn't really understand the point of, but
then we get to the turbulence expert and the turbulence expert is wonderful.
It's great.
This guy is on a plane.
He's super scared.
He turbulence hits.
He's freaking out like it's bad turbulence.
He feels like he's going to die.
The woman next to him, she's kind of freaking out too.
Uh, and he, you know, they kind of help each other through it or whatever.
And when he gets, when they land, he walks up to her.
He says, Hey, listen, I work for an organization that sends us on planes that we know are going
to experience severe turbulence while they're flying.
And my job is to go up there and be scared for my life and go through the turbulence.
And if I do that, it stops the plane from crashing.
It's like this, you know, like this, just a supernatural kind of a thing.
And he, he tells her that she did great up there by being scared, but also, well, I guess
just by being scared and getting through it.
Uh, and he's like, Hey, would you do that again?
And she agrees.
And so he kind of, it's like almost like the end of, uh, uh, M I B men in black when, uh,
Will Smith gets that chick to sort of join him.
I wonder what happened to her.
She's not in any of the other fucking movies, but yeah, turbulence expert.
Really good.
Lori is the next one.
Not a, I mean, this one, I didn't really, it's just a guy and he gets a dog.
I think after his wife dies, sorta John wick S except he's an older man.
He walks this dog a lot up and down the street or around the Florida like keys, which I liked
that it was including the keys, which was, which was fun.
And I guess the, the cover of you like it darker is a reference directly to Lori.
It looks like, cause it's got an alligator on the, on the Florida keys.
It's like, but anyway, uh, it's just this dude and he sees this, uh, one of his Trump
supporting neighbors get eaten by a crocodile or alligator and, uh, the alligators there
and his dog and him sorta, they survived the encounter and they walk away and that's sort
of the end.
Like I really didn't, I didn't get it.
Was that just even King wanted to kill a Trump supporter or was that, or was there something
I missed?
So I might have to reread that as well, just to, because from my perspective, it's sort
of just nothing happens.
It's kind of a nothing story.
Uh, okay.
So then we get into rattlesnakes, which is the secret sequel book.
This is a secret sequel to Cujo.
If you remember Cujo, woman and her son are trapped in a car in the heat of summer surrounded.
And there's a dog with rabies.
He's a giant St. Bernard and he surrounds the car and they can't get out.
And the book ends with the woman beating the dog to death with a broken baseball bat that
she found outside the car.
Then when she goes to go grab her son, it's too late.
It already died of dehydration, maybe hours before, maybe just like an hour or two before.
It's really sad.
And so you're reading rattlesnakes and it's about this old man, this retired man, his
wife had just died.
Uh, he's going to stay at his buddy's mansion.
It was like letting him just stay out in the Florida.
I think that's in the Florida Keys too.
I think he's just out there, uh, hanging out, just kind of trying to make sense of his life
after his wife died.
And at one point he's talking in his mind, he's having like a little internal narration.
He goes, I don't blame, you know, my, like, I, like, I'm not, I don't blame my son for
dying obviously of dehydration.
I don't blame my wife for failing to save him.
I don't even blame the dog, Cujo for surrounding them.
And when I read that line, I lost it.
I had to pause the book because I was listening to it on audio, uh, read by Will Patton, by
the way, which I'll say Will Patton is a great, is a great narrator for a singular book.
When you have to listen to him be the narrator for most of the short stories, because I think
a couple of them were read by Stephen King himself, who's a great audio narrator, by
the way.
Uh, Will Patton, it just, it sounds a little too Will Pattony, you know, he's, he's got
this, he's got this great voice for certain books.
I think he did Insomnia and I think Insomnia, him as the, as the guy for Insomnia is so
good.
He's got this like kind of older man voice that works perfectly for, especially that
one because that's about an old man.
But uh, yeah, so I mean, this was one of his better narrated ones was Rattlesnake, it's
an older guy, uh, going through some stuff.
But so he's, uh, he's dealing, so he's, he goes to this mansion.
His neighbor, this like woman, he gets a note from his, from the guy that he's renting,
or not renting, but staying at the mansion from, who's not there.
And he tells him a note saying, hey, your neighbor, the neighbor's a little weird, just
don't, you know, don't worry about it.
She's harmless.
And he meets the neighbor and it's another old woman and she's pushing around a stroller,
a double stroller with no kids inside of it.
And it's very sad.
They definitely have been dead for a while and she puts their just shorts and shirts,
changing them each day on the stroller and she just pushes them around and spends time
with them.
And she's kind of like frayed and harried and you know, just like, it's, it's, she's
a wreck.
But the, the main guy, he, uh, he def, he, he like says hi to the kids, you know, humors
her.
He goes over, brings him some, uh, cookies or something.
And uh, he, she says to the kids like, oh, don't misbehave as she, as they're like, quote
unquote, running around the house.
And he, uh, he's like, oh, it's fine.
They're just kids, you know, he like humors her.
So she dies and he starts hearing the stroller being pushed around at night and he starts
finding the stroller in his property after she's dead.
And he starts hearing the kids and he starts, they start like fucking with them in a way.
And he ends up like those kids, ghosts, their spirits are definitely behind and they start
haunting him until eventually he has to start pushing their stroller around to take care
of them.
And it's like pretty creepy.
And the fact that it's a secret Cujo novel that has nothing to do with dogs or anything
to do with Cujo.
The fact that it's just this poor guy has to now be haunted by, especially since his
own child was lost at a young age and her children were lost at a young age.
There's a lot of parallels there.
It makes them think about it.
It's pretty sad.
Uh, yeah, that one was excellent.
That's as good as a novella gets, you know, uh, the next one was the dreamers.
The dreamers is a guy who can, uh, transcribe words at like 180 words a minute or whatever.
It's ridiculous.
He gets hired by this, uh, doctor or whatever to help them write down notes of these experiments
that he's doing where he's having people trying to using, I guess, hypnosis and, uh, I think
a drug.
He tries to get these people to explore this house that's on this picture.
Like he, I think he shows them a picture and he goes, I want you to think about this house
and I want you to in your mind, go into that house if you can.
And he gets a few people, they like maybe, you know, in their minds, they can, they,
none of them can get inside the house or if they can, they can't describe it.
But then one guy, ex military comes in and the other, the main character is ex military.
The one dude comes in and he can get into the house and while he's in there, like he,
that opens up a door to another dimension and like this black shit starts coming out
of his eyes and stuff.
And it's like really horrific.
And it's, it's cool.
And then it, you know, the guy kind of covers it up.
The main character guy who's the transcriber, he covers it all up and then kind of moves
on with his life.
And then he's at work at a new place, the place he worked at prior.
And he's talking to some chick who went up for the same job as he did.
And he goes, oh, looks like my ex boss is dead.
You know, because he reading it in the newspaper that because I think the, the, the thing got
his boss too.
But that was fun.
I always liked some good inter interdimensional multiversal stuff.
I like that one.
And then the last one was the answer man and the answer man, according to something that
I read online took Stephen King, like 45 years to write in the sense that he started it 40
years ago and then he just was able to finish it for this.
And I could kind of see that it's pretty, I mean, it's, it's amazing.
It's a really good novella.
And I, I love the idea of it and I wish that I could meet the answer man, but it's, it's
this guy who's trying to decide whether or not he wants to be a lawyer in the city or
stay in the, or like stay in the small town.
And this is in the late, late thirties, I think this is prior to world war II.
And he's, and he's asked, and so he's just, he's debating, like, should I stay in town,
start a practice here and wait for the city to grow?
Should I go to the big city, work for my father and my father-in-law's firm?
Ah, it's a lot to think about.
And so as he's driving, he sees two miles till the answer man, like a sign, he goes,
that's weird.
One mile to the answer man, half a mile to the answer man.
And then eventually he sees a guy just kicking it in this little booth that he set up on
the side of the, or just, he's like in a lawn chair or whatever.
He's just there with an umbrella and just says answer man.
And he pulls over and he, you know, like on just on, just on a whim or whatever.
And he talks to him and the, and there's a sign that says $5 for five minutes and then
additional or first three questions free and then $5 for five minutes after that.
And so he, or, or $25, I think it was $5.
So he asks the guy, you know, like, what is this?
And the guy answers him and he goes, I'll give you that first one for free because I'll
give you an additional free question because that one was stupid.
And then he asks him another couple of stupid questions.
This guy's like, okay, I mean, here's your answers.
Those are the free ones.
But then, but then when he tries to ask him like a question to prove if he knows what
he's doing, the answer, like he doesn't come up with a good one.
So then he pays the guy, he's about to leave.
Then he thinks about it.
He goes, all right, fuck it.
I'll, I'll prove this guy's a shyster and I'll, you know, whatever.
So he gives him the five bucks and he's like, well, how would I prove, how can I get you
to prove whatever?
And the guy says to him, well, you should have asked me something like what's my mother's
maiden name or where did my father grow up?
Something that I couldn't possibly know unless I knew.
And so he does.
And when he figures out this answer man is like legit, he starts asking him, okay, shit,
my dad thinks that there's a war coming in a couple of years.
We're referencing World War II.
The guy's like, yes, it is.
The guy's like, oh shit, am I going to serve?
Yeah, you are.
Am I going to get hurt?
No, you won't.
Am I going to die?
No, you won't.
Oh, awesome.
Okay.
And then he's, should I stay here in town?
Yes, you should.
Okay.
Well, I'd be prosperous.
It's going to be fine.
Cool.
So after the five minutes is up, the answer man raises the price to whatever, to just
enough money that this guy doesn't have in his pockets.
And it's something like, you know, he sort of just blacks out.
And when he wakes up or when he comes to the answer man's god.
And so he goes to World War II.
And there's a moment where he's surrounded by Japanese fighters and like they're all
about to fucking die.
And so he thinks about what the answer man told him.
And he ends up standing up like crazy person and just starts lighting them all up and all
of their bullets missing.
He feels it tearing through his clothes, whatever, none of them hit him.
He ends up surviving.
So he knows for sure that the answer man was legit.
Opens his business in town, whatever.
It's prosperous.
And then later on in life, he sees signs one day while he's driving for the answer man
at two miles.
He goes, oh shit.
Oh, great.
And he's got money on him this time because he's a little bit more prepared or not prepared,
but he's like more affluent.
So he has money now.
And so he pulls over to the answer man and he he has a kid now, I think because he's
now you know, it's been maybe 10 years or whatever and 15 years where he's got a young
kid, young boy.
And he starts asking like, oh, and the boy's showing aptitude for baseball.
And so he uses a lot of his questions to be like, you know, like, hey, is my so is my
son going to play professional baseball?
No, he's not.
Is he going to play?
OK, college ball?
No.
High school?
No.
OK, interesting.
He'll probably end up doing something else with his life.
So then he starts asking other questions.
Turns out the reason the kid's not going to play high school baseball is because he dies
like shortly after, like as a young as a young boy.
And then I think he runs into the answer man like one more time.
They sort of have this like last sort of confrontation and sort of wraps things up, which I'm not
I don't remember entirely what the questions he asked were on that final part.
It's like I said, it's been a week since I've read this.
I've read a couple of other books since and sort of pushes things on my head.
I should have done this week ago, but I had the.
We had that the stranger one, Albert Camus, his name is anyway.
But yeah, so.
If we're going to rank this on Stephen King, let's see, what's he OK?
Well, it's a Stephen King book.
So I guess the universal way that you.
Rate a Stephen King book is by how many childhood bullies there are.
So out of five, so out of five, the real villain, it was the childhood bully all along.
I'm going to give you like it darker.
And I am judging this based off of more of his collection of short stories than I am
off of his overall work, and I am just kind of rating it against his own work and not
just against the overall mainstream of what's available.
I'm going to give this a.
Oh, man, honestly, a three, a three out of three point five out of five.
The real bully was the or the real villain was the bully all along.
But it's mainly because like if it bleeds was was I think.
I think that was like almost a five.
That was like a four point five out of five.
There's some things in you like it darker.
Some of the stories like that I just absolutely loved.
But then there's a few to me that didn't stand out.
So Lori Redscreen, even Willie the weirdo.
Wasn't wasn't anything crazy.
I liked two talented bastards, but even that, I mean, I liked that one.
Fifth step.
Not a fan, you know, because of the but that's just maybe a personal thing.
Willie Weirdo was like, OK, you know, but the bad dream one was great.
Finn was great on slide.
Road was great, Redscreen Turbulence was wonder was excellent.
Lori Rattlesnakes, Dreamers and Answer Man all.
Were phenomenal.
Actually, I would say Rattlesnakes and the Answer Man were phenomenal.
I'd say Dreamers was good.
So because of that, it's three point five.
I'm sorry if Stephen King ever listens to this, he won't.
But if he ever does, I love you.
Don't be mad at me.
Speaking of which, next week, the books I said books that I will be reviewing that we'll
all be reviewing together in this or we'll be discussing, I guess it's not really review,
even though I do review it at the end, is going to be a two fold.
It's a double.
It's two books because they are related to each other, not in the sense that it's a sequel
or prequel to each other, but they are parallel universe versions of one another.
And they are both by well, Stephen King's The Regulators and Richard Bachman's.
No, I'm so sorry.
Richard Bachman, The Regulators and then Desperation by Stephen King are the two books.
And we will get into why they are related to each other.
Who's Richard Bachman and why is he writing a Stephen King book if you don't already know?
And we'll go from there.
This has been Wednesday Night Book Club.
This has been fun.
I appreciate you guys for joining me on this.
If you have any suggestions, go to the website, friedricepodcast.com.
You can fill out one of the things on the bottom.
You can call our number that we have there, leave a voicemail.
Give me an idea for what book you want me to cover or review.
I'm open to anything.
And I think if I don't get any suggestions, I'm just going to keep doing Stephen King
or horror books because honestly, horror is the only genre.
I think horror when it comes to books is the horror that I love.
Movies, the moment you see the main monster, the moment the gimmick is given away, you
see the alien, you see the Pennywise monster, whatever.
The fear dissipates instantly and you just know now what this special effect or practical
effect is going to look like for the rest of the movie.
It's kind of like whatever.
And so they don't excite me.
For a good horror movie to excite me, it has to have some sort of hook, some sort of psychological
thing to it or even just a fun hook.
Maybe Happy Death Day is a horror movie if you want to consider or maybe a thriller or
whatever, but I like that because of the Groundhog's Day effect of repeating the same day.
That made it a fun watch.
But when it comes to books, you can get absolutely terrifying with the right book.
And I feel like Stephen King has set up so many moments in his novels in the past that
have been terrifying.
And there's a few in this one that stand out.
But I do think the regulators and desperation are pretty good.
So Buck Love, try to read them if you can by next week.
I don't know.
Fuck it.
Who cares?
Have a great night and thanks for joining me.
It's been Wednesday Night Book Club.
I'm Andy Rice, your host.
Have a wonderful night.