Stephen King: End of watch

Stephen King : End of watch      - 368 oldal

szerintem: ★★★★☆

IN ​ROOM 217 OF THE LAKES REGION TRAUMATIC BRAIN INJURY CLINIC, SOMETHING HAS AWAKENED. SOMETHING EVIL.

Brady Hartsfield, perpetrator of the Mercedes Massacre, where eight people were killed and many more were badly injured, has been in the Traumatic Brain Injury Clinic for five years, in a vegetative state. According to his doctors, anything approaching a complete recovery is unlikely. But behind the drool and stare, Brady is awake, and in possession of deadly new powers that allow him to wreak unimaginable havoc without ever leaving his hospital room.

Retired police detective Bill Hodges, the unlikely hero of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers, now runs an investigation agency with his partner, Holly Gibney, who delivered the blow to Hartsfield's head that put him on the brain injury ward. Brady also remembers that. When Bill and Holly are called to a murder-suicide with ties to the Mercedes Massacre, they find themselves pulled into their most dangerous case yet, one that will put not only their lives at risk, but those of Hodges’s friend Jerome Robinson and his teenage sister, Barbara. Because Brady Hartsfield is back, and planning revenge not just on Bill Hodges and his friends, but on an entire city.

In End of Watch, Stephen King brings the Hodges trilogy to a sublimely terrifying conclusion, combining the detective fiction of Mr. Mercedes and Finders Keepers with the supernatural suspense that has been his trademark. The result is an unnerving look at human vulnerability and up-all-night entertainment.

"The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots."

"The reasons never matter because suicide goes against every human instinct, and that makes it insane"

"How some people carelessly squander what others would sell their souls to have: a healthy, pain-free body. And why? Because they're too blind, too emocionally scarred, or too self-involved to see past the earth's dark curve to the next sunrise. Which always comes, if one continues to draw breath."

Stephen King: Finders Keepers

 

Stephen King: Finders keepers       - 434 oldal

szerintem:  ★★★☆☆

A ​sequel to Mr. Mercedes and second part of a proposed trilogy.

“Wake up, genius.” So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, a Salinger-like icon who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.

Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Sauberg finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years.

Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous. Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever.

"if you didn't had hopes and ambitions when you were a teenager, you'd be pretty much fucked later on"

"We need to talk is Momspeak for Houston, we have a problem."

Stephen King: If it bleeds

 Stephen King: If it bleeds    -  366 oldal 

szerintem: ★★☆☆☆

News people have a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads'. And a bomb at Albert Macready Middle School is guaranteed to lead any bulletin.

Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog - and on her own need to be more assertive - when she sees the footage on TV. But when she tunes in again, to the late-night report, she realizes there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene. So begins 'If It Bleeds' , a stand-alone sequel to The Outsider featuring the incomparable Holly on her first solo case.

Dancing alongside are three more long stories - 'Mr Harrigan's Phone', 'The Life of Chuck' and 'Rat' .

The novella is a form King has returned to over and over again in the course of his amazing career, and many have been made into iconic films, If It Bleeds is a uniquely satisfying collection of longer short fiction by an incomparably gifted writer.

" 'Youth is a wonderful thing,' said Mr Harrigan. 'What a shame it's wasted on children.' "

"In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wadded to the world. If so, it's probably a bad marriage." 

" 'I want to believe in God, Unc, and I sort of do, but I don't understand why it has to be this way. Why god would let it be this way. It's a mystery? You're the hotshot philosophy guy and that's the best you can do?' " 

"He supposed Franzen had had a point about the time before writing a novel actually began. It was a good time, because everything you saw and heard was possible grist for the mill. Everything was malleable. The mind could build a city, remodel it, then raze it, all while you were taking a shower or shaving or having a piss. Once you began, however, that changed. Every sentence you wrote, every word you wrote, limited your options a little more." 

"If it was a lie it was a white one, just a device to short-circuit an argument before it could be born. Husbands and wifes did it all the time. It was the way marriages survived."

Stephen King: Elevation

 Stephen King: Elevation     -  132 oldal.

szerintem: ★★☆☆☆

Although Scott Carey doesn’t look any different, he’s been steadily losing weight. There are a couple of other odd things, too. He weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott doesn’t want to be poked and prodded. He mostly just wants someone else to know, and he trusts Doctor Bob Ellis.

In the small town of Castle Rock, the setting of many of King’s most iconic stories, Scott is engaged in a low grade—but escalating—battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly drops his business on Scott’s lawn. One of the women is friendly; the other, cold as ice. Both are trying to launch a new restaurant, but the people of Castle Rock want no part of a gay married couple, and the place is in trouble. When Scott finally understands the prejudices they face–including his own—he tries to help. Unlikely alliances, the annual foot race, and the mystery of Scott’s affliction bring out the best in people who have indulged the worst in themselves and others.

 

"Why feel bad about what you couldn't change? Why not embrace it?" 

Stephen King : 11.22.63

Stephen King : 11.22.63

szerintem: ★★★★★

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk.

Not much later, Jake’s friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.

"Making the world a better place is important but so is being able to get to the john under your own power."

"There's really nothng in the world that can match the glamour of a late-stage alcoholic; I can't think why Jim Beam, Seagram's, and Mike's Hard Lemonade don't use them in their magazine ads. Drink Beam and see a better class of bugs."

"life's simplest answers are often the easiest to overlook"

"Home is watching the moon rise over the open, sleeping land and having someone you can call to the window, so you can look together. Home is where you dance with others, and dancing is life."

"We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it's too late."

"I know life is hard, I think everyone knows that in their hearts, but why does it have to be cruel, as well? Why does it have to bite?" 

"Is there any phrase more ominous than you need to see exactly what you've done? 

Stephen King: Doctor Sleep

Stephen King : Doctor Sleep    - 485 oldal

értékelés, szerintem: ★★★★★

Stephen ​King returns to the characters and territory of one of his most popular novels ever, The Shining, in this instantly riveting novel about the now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) and the very special twelve-year-old girl he must save from a tribe of murderous paranormals.

On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless—mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and tween Abra Stone learns, The True Knot are quasi-immortal, living off the “steam” that children with the “shining” produce when they are slowly tortured to death.

Haunted by the inhabitants of the Overlook Hotel where he spent one horrific childhood year, Dan has been drifting for decades, desperate to shed his father’s legacy of despair, alcoholism, and violence. Finally, he settles in a New Hampshire town, an AA community that sustains him, and a job at a nursing home where his remnant “shining” power provides the crucial final comfort to the dying. Aided by a prescient cat, he becomes “Doctor Sleep.”

Then Dan meets the evanescent Abra Stone, and it is her spectacular gift, the brightest shining ever seen, that reignites Dan’s own demons and summons him to a battle for Abra’s soul and survival. This is an epic war between good and evil, a gory, glorious story that will thrill the millions of hyper-devoted readers of The Shining and wildly satisfy anyone new to the territory of this icon in the King canon.

"He had always thought the story of Bluebeard was the scariest of all time, the scariest there ever could be, but this one was worse. Because it was true."

"No, honey. Maybe you can put the things from the Overlook away in lockboxes, but not memories. Never those. They're the real ghosts."


"The only one who can put on the breaks is you. (...) You don't have to live this way if you don't want to. You can, of course ... but you don't have to."


"There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went."


"Because if suicide was the only option, you could at least choose your weapon."


"The mind was a blackboard. Booze was the eraser."


"the good thing about being old is that you don't have to worry about dying young"


"Life was a wheel, its only job was to turn, and it always came back to where it had started."

Stephen King: The Shining

Stephen King: The Shining     - 497 oldal                     

szerintem:  ★★★★★

The Overlook Hotel is more than just a home-away-from-home for the Torrance family. For Jack, Wendy, and their young son, Danny, it is a place where past horrors come to life. And where those gifted with the shining do battle with the darkest evils. Stephen King's classic thriller is one of the most powerfully imagined novels of our time.

"For aren't memories the true ghosts of our lives? Do they not drive all of us to words and acts we regret from time to time?"


"The truth is that monsters are real, and ghosts are real, too. They live inside us, and sometimes they win."


"He would write it for the reason he felt that all great literature, fiction and nonfiction, was written: truth comes out, in the end it always comes out."


"That's your job in this world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what. Pull your act together and just go on."


" Children have to grow into their imaginations like a pair of oversized shoes."


"skizoid behavior is a pretty common thing in children. It's accepted, because all we adults have this unspoken agreement that children are lunatics. They have invisible friends. They may go and sit in the closet when they're depressed, withdrawing from the world. They attach talismanic importance to a special blanket, or a taddy bear, or a stuffed tiger. They suck their thumbs. When an adult sees things that aren't there, we consider him ready for the rubber room. When a child says he's seen a troll in his bedroom or a vampire outside the window, we simply smile indulgently. We have a one-sentence explanation that explains the whole range of such phenomena in children-'


'He'll grow out of it,'

Stephen King: Outsider

Stephen King: Outsider    - 576 oldal

értékelés, szerintem: ★★★☆☆

An unspeakable crime. A confounding investigation. At a time when the King brand has never been stronger, he has delivered one of his most unsettling and compulsively readable stories.

An eleven-year-old boy’s violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City’s most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad.

As the investigation expands and horrifying answers begin to emerge, King’s propulsive story kicks into high gear, generating strong tension and almost unbearable suspense. Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face? When the answer comes, it will shock you as only Stephen King can

"Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end."

"I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of."

"People are blind to explanations that lie outside their perception of reality."

"Dreams are the way we touch the unseen world"

"If you can’t let go of the past, the mistakes you’ve made will eat you alive."