There's a terrifying sameness to these attempts at a paranormal frisson that renders them collectively soporific. The best approach, in my humble estiThere's a terrifying sameness to these attempts at a paranormal frisson that renders them collectively soporific. The best approach, in my humble estimation, is to set this short young adult anthology beside the commode in your bathroom and to read them 5 pages at a time, one story at a time. That's the only chance this one has at retaining its interest across the entire anthology....more
A tantalizing anthology of horror shorts by an up and coming Canadian author
Several years ago, when I read the original edition of ONE HAND SCREAMINGA tantalizing anthology of horror shorts by an up and coming Canadian author
Several years ago, when I read the original edition of ONE HAND SCREAMING (that, by the way, converted me to an eager fan of all of Mark Leslie's work), I wrote a review that I see no sense in changing.
"It’s easy to find a collection of words to describe ONE HAND SCREAMING, a fine collection of horror shorts by an under-rated young Canadian author – titillating, horrifying, shocking, thought-provoking, hilarious, creepy, gruesome, campy, provocative … ! If you take the time to read it, I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with your own set of complimentary adjectives.
Goodness knows, there’s lots for anyone who enjoys the horror genre to get their teeth into – sentient snowmen terrified of their coming excruciating death in the spring melt; the real reason why so many people suffer from arachnophobia; the clever story of a courageous mother’s fight to save her family from kidnapping by a marauding cult roaming the streets around her home; what it really means to lose yourself in a bookstore; an ornate Victorian mirror’s ghostly preservation of the rape of its owner; why you should probably re-think your decision to be a Hallowe’en Grinch hiding in the dark from the youngsters out trick-or-treating; a novel re-telling of a couple of old campfire chestnuts; and lots more.
The addition of Leslie’s “author’s notes” for each story is an informative, interesting bonus. It’s remarkable to hear of a story’s provenance – how each story moved from the nugget of an idea to a fully fleshed-out published tale; how each story fit into the author’s ongoing personal thinking or the development of his life and his career as an author.
Most enjoyable and highly recommended."
It was true "20 HAUNTING YEARS" ago and it's true now. The addition of several new stories simply makes the book bigger, better, more haunting and more entertaining.
“Count prime numbers. Think of the books you liked when you were a kid. Spell xylophone backwards.”
Brady Hartsfield is a literary bad boy whose villa “Count prime numbers. Think of the books you liked when you were a kid. Spell xylophone backwards.”
Brady Hartsfield is a literary bad boy whose villainy places him in the ranks of the most evil bad boys at the rarified top of the proverbial literary heap of villains – Hannibal Lecter, Aaron Stampler, Voldemort and Sauron, Joffrey Baratheon, Bill Sykes, Mr Hyde, and James Moriarty, for example. Elite company indeed.
Brady is a mass murderer but not one to fool around with mere weak-kneed wimpy weapons such as the typical American tool of choice – an AR-15, even converted to full automatic fire. An accomplished techno-geek and hacker, suffering, not to put too fine a point on it, from a complex set of complexes (not the least of which is a deeply entrenched Oedipus complex), he has chosen other more efficient weapons to dispatch large numbers of society in a short time – a powerful Mercedes driven at high speed through an unsuspecting crowd followed up by a powerful fragmentation bomb loaded with ball-bearings for shrapnel to be detonated among a crowd of young worshipful teenage girls at a music concert.
Like so many other mass murderers and serial murderers, Brady Hartsfield craves notoriety, fame, adulation, and public acknowledgement as a genius. He has chosen retired detective Bill Hodges as the target of his attempts to earn that notoriety and to taunt law enforcement with the ease with which he avoids them and defeats them.
Despite its length, MR MERCEDES is an epic page turner that deserves every over-used expression of praise that was ever pulled out of a critic’s lexicon to apply to suspense thrillers – breathtaking, gripping, compelling, … well, you get the idea! Stephen King’s character development is beyond brilliant. And then there’s that ending! Twist endings are an old, old, old chestnut that authors attempt with virtually every second suspense thriller that has ever been published. But this one? Omigod, it has to rank among the very best that I’ve ever read.
MR MERCEDES easily earns a 6-star ranking out of 5 and my heartiest recommendation to other lovers of the suspense thriller/horror genre. And now, I’m off to the bookstore to find a copy of the second in the Bill Hodges’ trilogy, FINDERS KEEPERS.
“… a series of short stories with twists and turns meant to unhinge minds and pull on heartstrings.”
When I reviewed an earlier collection of Ms K “… a series of short stories with twists and turns meant to unhinge minds and pull on heartstrings.”
When I reviewed an earlier collection of Ms King’s short stories, TRULY UNFORTUNATE, I wasn’t shy about heaping on a helping of 5-star praise and kudos:
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is definitely a blend of genres – paranormal, horror, psychological thriller, and murder mystery. … Drawing on whiffs of the supernatural abilities of Stephen King’s eponymous character CARRIE, C.A. King places Truly [DeCanter] at the heart of a pattern of unexplained deaths in Knollville. The police investigators acknowledge that the solution to the mystery, if it is even possible to find one, lies beyond the realm of normal human experience.
[A small piece of foreshadowing, I believed, that hinted the investigators themselves to be beyond that aforementioned realm of normal human experience]…
TRULY UNFORTUNATE is short and sweet but it’s a gripping page-turner and a novel that will definitely raise your eyebrows with hopes to follow up on further entries in the series. And, more than that, I’ll definitely be looking for other novels by the same author.
And so, as you might imagine, it was with considerable anticipation that I opened the pages of FREAKY FINALES, a recently published anthology of Ms King’s shorts that obviously promised what I hoped would be some unforeseen clever endings. And it was with even more considerable disappointment that I discovered the near novella length RESPECT, sub-titled AN ANGEL’S FALL FROM HEAVEN, to be little more than a maudlin philosophical essay on the origin and nature of angels and Ms King’s imaginings with regard to the musings of a capricious God. This was a stand-alone God clearly based in the Christian beliefs of monotheism and the unknowable motivations of that God in his creation of such things as death, disease, hardship, and negative emotions!
Consider this conversation between God and one of his angels, defined in truly appalling Mother Teresa fashion as “…a person who has been left bone-weary by life, but still retails their inner beauty and compassion, shining brightly” in which God justifies his creation of the vagaries and difficulties which mortals must face as an implicit part of their mortality:
“Do you actually consider being mortal a gift?”
God sighed. “I consider giving you the freedom to choose a gift. I think having emotions is a gift. There are many benefits to being human.”
“And downsides!” Xarlapin exclaimed [the angel facing incipient “demotion” to mortal status] “What about negative emotions like sadness, pain, jealousy, and death?”
“They serve their purposes,” God answered, stroking his long beard. “Without death, there is no life. Without sickness, there is no health. Without sadness, one would never know true happiness. There is a balance to everything.”
Frankly, my admittedly long-standing atheist opinion characterizes that as apologist theistic codswallop with a particularly Christian bent! And it gets worse. Having already insisted on the paradoxical notion of allowing her omnipotent God to craft human creatures with free will and the power to make decisions of which he has no foreknowledge and over which he has no power or say, she continues to make that God fundamentally homophobic:
“God chuckled. “You’ve already made your first choice as a mortal. You decided you wanted to be a man, not a woman.”
He [Xarlapin, now a mortal "he" as opposed to a genderless angel] glanced down. “I don’t remember doing that”.
“Your subconscious took charge there,” God snickered. “I expect it’s because of your feelings for a certain professor.”
Clearly it was beyond Ms King’s God’s limited imagination to see that love for that female professor need not necessarily emanate from a man.
To make a long story short, RESPECT was not well-crafted horror or a paranormal short story with a twist ending that pulled on my heartstrings. It was nothing more than tedious, pedantic proselytizing and I have now put paid to reading anything further by Ms King despite the previous praise I offered to her work when it was unsullied by such nonsense.
“One road in, no road out …” Wayward Pines was definitely not typical Smalltown USA!
Recovering from a brief bout with amnesia after an apparent car “One road in, no road out …” Wayward Pines was definitely not typical Smalltown USA!
Recovering from a brief bout with amnesia after an apparent car crash, Secret Service Agent Ethan Burke shakily picks up where he left off – the search for two missing fellow agents, one of whom is a woman with whom he had a brief relationship that almost destroyed his marriage. But Wayward Pines is not the utopian small town that it appears to be. And Sheriff Arnold Pope, the local representative of law enforcement, and Dr Jenkins are obviously a good deal more than a police officer and a benevolent small town general practitioner.
Reminiscent of the 1967 British television series THE PRISONER, and HG Wells' wildly popular classic THE TIME MACHINE, Blake Crouch’s PINES, the opening novel in a trilogy, is a brilliant, compelling, sci-fi tale which will enchant its readers with a dark and deeply disturbing horror story of evolution, dystopia, genocide, and government overreach.
If like me, you’re a latecomer to the party and you’ve yet to read PINES, a novel that is now deservedly honored and revered as a dark cult classic, hie thee to your local purveyor of literature and get set for a high speed chiller. You’re definitely in for a treat.
A thoroughly enjoyable somewhat tongue-in-cheek ghost story delivered in Mark Leslie's inimitable fashion with a clever ending anDon't forget the tip!
A thoroughly enjoyable somewhat tongue-in-cheek ghost story delivered in Mark Leslie's inimitable fashion with a clever ending and a dollop of humour along the way. The takeaway message for the reader just has to be to never forget to tip the pizza delivery guy!...more
“It wasn’t just a young, pretty, and smart woman driving away that night;”
“... she was a bookmark in the novel that was his life, showing him where h“It wasn’t just a young, pretty, and smart woman driving away that night;”
“... she was a bookmark in the novel that was his life, showing him where he was currently and holding the place from where the story could or should be started again.”
It’s tough not to gush about the sheer brilliance of COLD! A straight-up horror novel by a Canadian aboriginal author that riffs on some not unexpected aboriginal themes – university level indigenous studies programs; racism and xenophobia; hockey as a typical sport for aboriginal young men; isolation of northern aboriginal communities; and, of course, survival in that most contemptible of institutions, government and church run residential schools.
The horror? Well, what else? Serial murder and a man-eating wendigo, described in Wikipedia as “a supernatural being belonging to the spiritual traditions of Algonquian-speaking First Nations in North America. Wendigos are described as powerful monsters that have a desire to kill and eat their victims. In most legends, humans transform into wendigos because of their greed or weakness.”
And the title COLD? Well, aside from the generic widespread association of cold weather with Canada, “the wendigo was a personification of cold and hunger in a time when human survival relied on banding together and sharing resources, particularly during the long, harsh winters of the northern wilderness.”
And the nature of the wendigo curse? ”The curse transforms any person who eats human flesh of another human being in the Canadian wilderness into a massive, fur-covered humanoid beast with fangs and razor sharp claws.”
COLD is a murder mystery, a suspense thriller, a police procedural, a brilliant portrayal of a handful of compelling characters, a dollop of humour that never seems out of place or capable of disrupting the flow of an extremely high-speed narrative stemming from a plane crash in the Canadian sub-arctic AND some very, very skilled atmospheric writing. Kudos to a Canadian author who is definitely on my radar screen for future reading.
A dead end street – nine houses, nine neighbours, nine creepy little horror shorts!
The host of a street dinner party makes the startling revelation toA dead end street – nine houses, nine neighbours, nine creepy little horror shorts!
The host of a street dinner party makes the startling revelation to his guests that the original residents of their houses were a coven of nine witches who made a pact to keep “the spirits bound to the other realm”. But, in time, that magic has been weakening, “barely holding on by a thread”. If the residents fail to strengthen the number nine in their lives, then the resulting failure of that binding could free those spirits. “Terrible things could happen on Nine Street”. And THAT is the basis for a thoroughly entertaining collection of tales indeed!
TWISTED TALES OF A DEAD END STREET is a bravura collection of fast-paced horror shorts with themes of murder, animal abuse, paranormal, and malevolent spirits delivered with humour, a cast of characters with tongue-in-cheek Dickensian names, and suitably gothic atmosphere. Although each of the chapters stands on its own merits as a compelling short story, the linkage between the stories provides the basis for a clever ending twist in the final chapter.
This is the first of three books that I purchased when I met the author at a local book fair. I’m definitely looking forward to the other two and I’m thrilled to have made the acquaintance of such a skilled local author that I can happily recommend to fellow readers.
“People … it appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”
A heat wave in northern New England, a fearsome storm, a fog, and then an all-encom“People … it appears we have a problem of some magnitude here.”
A heat wave in northern New England, a fearsome storm, a fog, and then an all-encompassing mist traps a motley collection of shoppers in a grocery store. The mist is pure evil and what it brings to life with it will raise the hackles on a reader’s neck.
THE MIST is a fast-paced, gruesome, gothic, imaginative, creep-fest that showcases Stephen King’s flair for creating a cast of characters with a myriad of reactions to what is pure over-the-top Hollywood horror. But it’s great entertainment and, goodness knows, it’s easy to recommend to lovers of the horror genre.
“Human beings have been eagerly devouring notions of evil and horror since we dwelt in caves and jumped at the shadows and noises occurring just outsi“Human beings have been eagerly devouring notions of evil and horror since we dwelt in caves and jumped at the shadows and noises occurring just outside the comforting range of firelight.”
“Canadians, especially, have always been concerned with notions of what lies beyond our normal existence.”
In ONLY MONSTERS IN THE BUILDING, author Mark Leslie went to great lengths to assure readers who shared his concerns that while paranormals might be creatures that inhabit that realm beyond our normality, they are definitely people too. People, in fact, with all the frustrations, foibles, fears, and failings that we “normals” deal with everyday in our lives. And, in crafting his cast of what Leslie characterized as “supernatural misfits (a studious fairy, a vegan vampire, a shy mermaid, a clingy werecat, and an extroverted troll)”, he also crafted a clever mystery and a brilliant master class in “show, don’t tell” character development!
How did he do it??
ONLY MONSTERS IN THE BUILDING is effectively a novel length reproduction of conversations in a series of therapy sessions between a confused patient (distressed werewolf and definitely paranormal though he may be) and his therapist. But Leslie has managed to alternate those periods of the eponymous Canadian Werewolf Michael Andrews’ directed self-examination with chapters of real-time interaction with the rest of his fellow abnormal paranormals in a cozy locked-room style murder mystery that makes the entire package genuinely enthralling, entertaining, humorous, and compelling.
Leslie’s development of Michael Andrews’ skills as an author and his personality and back story may not constitute a birth to present day autobiography (I mean … how could it? Andrews IS a werewolf after all!). But the extent to which Leslie injects himself into the Michael Andrews persona would please even the likes of Charles Dickens, author of the classic DAVID COPPERFIELD. The novel is absolutely jam-packed with film, music, television, and 20th century cultural references that reflect Leslie’s love of the world he lived in as he grew up. He even managed to sneak in a few cheeky references to his own writing by attributing it to work in Andrews’ bibliography. Fairy Ellie’s gushing praise of SILENT SCREAMS, Michael Andrews’ first and wildly undersold and distinctly unpopular first novel, was in fact a stand-in for one of Leslie’s earlier collection of short stories, ONE HAND SCREAMING which he prefaced with this comment concerning his propensity to mentally collect everyday occurrences for use in his writing,
“Silent screams bounce around inside my head like an impending storm brewing into a force that will escape in a wild dance of chaos and be lost forever if I don’t stop to jot them down.”
If you’ve got more time and patience than you know what to do with, perhaps you might want to re-read ONLY MONSTERS IN THE BUILDING with a view to snagging and listing all of the cultural references or Leslie’s meta-references to his own previous novels, novellas and short stories. An aspiring future scholar of English literature might choose to use that as in a Masters or PhD thesis after Leslie has attained classic status as a horror humorist.
Definitely recommended as one of my Top Ten favourites for this year.
Paul Weiss
P.S. Recommended that is with the very strong caveat that this is NOT a stand-alone novel and would make very little sense without an understanding of the Canadian Werewolf back story. But, fret not, do yourself a favour a go back to A CANADIAN WEREWOLF IN NEW YORK, #1 in the series. You're in for a real treat!...more
“Even if, one day, proof is given that our fear-created beings do not actually exist, we will probably invent new ones”
Even as Shakespeare’s coven“Even if, one day, proof is given that our fear-created beings do not actually exist, we will probably invent new ones”
Even as Shakespeare’s coven of witches knew that meeting with Macbeth would ultimately result in something evil,
“By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. Open locks, Whoever knocks!”
so did the mind of Canadian author and purveyor of horror shorts know that unexpected meetings between strangers might produce strange, dare I say it, twisted outcomes!
UNEXPECTED STRANGERS is a delightful, quirky, quick and easy, eyebrow raising collection of oddball shorts. I was more than pleased to see the author take a couple of quick shots at two of my favourite boogiemen - organized religion and its propensity to proselytize; and the world’s current misguided fascination with fascism and the far right!
Well done, Mr Leslie. Keep ‘em coming! I’m a big fan and I’m definitely looking forward to further anthologies like this one.
“Literature has always fascinated me. With writing, humankind has developed the ability to elevate a person to a state of immortality.”
… “Perhaps that“Literature has always fascinated me. With writing, humankind has developed the ability to elevate a person to a state of immortality.”
… “Perhaps that is why I had spent the last three decades of my life writing, trying to capture the spirit of myself on paper.”
Well, Mr Leslie, I gotta hand it to you. If this literary tidbit reflects your objective as an author and this gruesome, juicy collection of three little pieces of mayhem reflects “your spirit” on paper, then you’re one mighty sick puppy, LOL!
ACTIVE READER and Other Cautionary Tales From the Book World is a short (but most definitely not sweet) read at 64 pages that will take little more than an hour of your time. But the frisson factor and the number of times that you will find yourself raising your eyebrows with a wry head-shaking grimace are out of all proportion to the miniature proportions of the collection.
ACTIVE READER is a tale of stalking and psychopathy with a brilliant, totally macabre twist ending that would shock even hard-core fans of LAW AND ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT. BROWSERS is a tale of a bookstore with a twisted personality, reminiscent in my mind of the rooms in Robert A Heinlein’s AND HE BUILT A CROOKED HOUSE. If the limited reading time remaining in what we all know is our limited life bothers you, it is a tale that will give you pause and make you perhaps more careful of what you wish for. Last but not least, DISTRACTIONS is a cautionary tale that speaks against taking the simplistic mantras offered by many self-help gurus too literally.
I’ve been a Mark Leslie fan for some time now and ACTIVE READER is obviously on the list of reasons why. Definitely recommended and a virtually certain addition to my Top Ten List for 2024.
And (LOL … I think!), once you’ve read the eponymous story, you’ll understand why I’m a little bit freaked that Mr Leslie signed my copy with the caption, “To Paul, one of my favourite ACTIVE READERS”!! Oh, oh!
I might also add that I'm prompted to seek out my long unread, languishing copy of George Stewart's EARTH ABIDES.
”I read evil things between the lines in the newspapers, and usually very faintly but sometimes quite plainly I see, behind the transparent front o”I read evil things between the lines in the newspapers, and usually very faintly but sometimes quite plainly I see, behind the transparent front of things, that cave-man face …”
THE CROQUET PLAYER is definitely not the kind of story HG Wells fans would expect if they were looking for sci-fi novels that might compare to the likes of THE TIME MACHINE or THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU. It is actually a dark, deeply atmospheric ghost story written with a foreboding, “haunting” literary style that would have done credit to the likes of Edgar Allan Poe or HP Lovecraft. The evil in the story arises from a small town named Cainsmarsh in a clear reference to the first biblical murder. While it dabbles briefly in the ultra-religious Calvinistic preaching against the scientific truth of Darwin’s theories of evolution, ultimately THE CROQUET PLAYER is believed by literary scholars to be a cautionary allegorical tale warning England and the world against the dangers of Hitler and his emerging cult of Nazism. In effect, Wells compares an unnamed Hitler to an emerging universal evil in the world that is equivalent to a resurgence of antediluvian and unevolved beast man or caveman. Frankly, I think this is an insult to the behaviour and thinking of pre-Homo Sapiens species such as the Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon and reflects a rather self-righteous view of the advanced moralistic state of human thinking.
I would prefer to consider a somewhat more modern interpretation (strictly my own, I might add) in which the entire story is allegorical INCLUDING the references to caveman fossils and bones. Consider the caveman fossils and bones as being Hitler and the evils of Nazism which ought to serve as its own warning to today’s and future humanity. The frightening ghostly evil emerging from the mists of the story’s locale in Cainsmarsh stands in for the global fascination with neo-Nazism and hard right-wing politics with which the world is currently flirting. Most notably, of course, the USA might do very well to consider HG Wells as having offered a prescient warning against the rising evils of Trump, MAGA Republicans, and their version of neo-Nazism. YMMV and you might consider this idea to be far wide of the mark, but it is what it is.
“Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped “Three smallmouth bass so far, another three pike, and a couple of smaller pickerel … she had pulled in about half of the net already. She’d hoped for a few more fish.”
In MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, Canadian author Waubgeshig Rice explored what happens in a post-apocalyptic world where the bridge to civilization, as fragile and as tenuous as it was when it existed, collapses utterly – complete power failure, total communications blackout, no internet, no telephone, no television, no delivery of any goods or commodities, no fuel.
Ten years later, life in a small aboriginal community fully isolated from the outside world, from the white world, a life renewing their dwindling Anishinaabe traditions, has encountered the fatal roadblock of dwindling resources. Their lake is overfished and the land-based animal resources have fled the neighborhood of their community. Migration to a new home has become a vital necessity and the elders of the community have decided it is time to send a scouting party to their traditional home area of the northern shores of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. They need to discover whether life in their former home is viable.
As one might expect in any such novel, the reader is met with a complete spectrum of actions and reactions – heroism, cowardice, bravery, courage, violence, fear, hope, despair, doubt, greed, generosity, leadership, withdrawal and, of course, more than a few deaths under a myriad of related circumstances. Sadly, author Rice also tells a story in which a post-apocalyptic world has failed to learn from its past errors, its past hatred, and most definitely has not evolved into a post-racial world. Racism and xenophobia remains an endemic component of white, western society.
MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES is a worthy sequel and although it does not have quite the strength and compelling urgency of its predecessor MOON OF THE CRUSTED SNOW, it is an easy novel to recommend to those who enjoy themes of post-apocalypse and dystopia. Learning some of the components of aboriginal Anishinaabe culture and their relationship to the world around us is a definite bonus.
I’m generally not a fan of the horror genre. That and my brother’s firmly stated dislike of Stephen King’s work Yes, Virginia, there IS a multiverse!
I’m generally not a fan of the horror genre. That and my brother’s firmly stated dislike of Stephen King’s work (our tastes seem reasonably closely aligned) kept me from trying anything by King for until I was firmly ensconced in my eighth decade of reading. Other than serendipity and finding a free copy in one of our Local Free Library boxes, I can’t imagine what prompted me to start with an immense chunkster like 11/22/63! But start it I did … and my reaction is hands down “WOW”! 11/22/63 is a page turner for every one of its 1100 pages.
If somebody suggested to me that it was possible to create a novel that dumped historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy, dystopia, alternate history, and romance into a genre blender to create a credible and completely compelling novel that would have me holding my breath through the length of a 1000+ page doorstopper, I would in turn have suggested that they get their head read. 11/22/63 fits the bill.
A time portal or an alternate world portal is a well-worn fantasy trope. Indeed a reader of fantasy and science fiction would not raise many eyebrows if they suggested it was over-used. But once Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in small town Maine steps through a time portal and finds himself in a very racist, very misogynist, very McCarthy-esque anti-Communist mid-20th century USA, Stephen King’s awesome story-telling ability will carry you away.
The pathos in King’s description of an essay from one of Epping’s students describing his father’s sledge-hammer slaughter of their entirely family was heartbreaking. The heartwarming evolution of Epping’s love for fellow teacher Sadie Dunhill (in the past, mind you) would put to shame any efforts by any romance author you care to name. There’s a fabulously clever twist. Epping’s presence in the past invokes the well known butterfly effect and changes his subsequent future BUT any return visit to the past resets everything to where it was before his first step through the portal. Now THAT would put a smile on any successful sci-fi or fantasy author’s face. The new past and alternate future history created by Epping’s interference in the events in 1963 Dallas is disturbing and completely terrifying.
Taking a cue from Alfred Hitchcock’s working manuals and his perennial cameo appearances in his movies, King manages to squeeze in any number of sneaky references to Pennywise, the evil clown of IT fame. (I’m betting there were other references to previous novels sprinkled throughout the story but – as I said – I haven’t read any other King novels so, if they were there, they went right over my head).
Did I say that I hadn’t read any other King novels? That’s a situation I plan to change very quickly.
