Anxiety-provoking reading experiences

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I started watching the horror anthology series Creepshow on Viaplay, and the second episode was already unsettling to me because of its subject matter. In that episode, a girl had a dollhouse, and in her absence, its inhabitants began to move to different places on their own.

Then I started thinking about my memorable unsettling reading experiences.

They all seem to have something in common, namely something evil that keeps getting closer.

 

Stephen King's The Sun Dog (from the collection Four Past Midnight)

A boy receives a Polaroid camera as a gift. In every picture he takes, a dog appears. At first, just as a small dot in the background, but it gets closer and more threatening as it goes. What happens when the menacing dog crosses the line between photographs and reality?

 

 

 

The Moving Finger by Stephen King (from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes)

A man notices a finger in the opening of the bathroom sink. An epic battle ensues between him and the surprisingly long finger.

I had no idea that this story was reportedly made into an episode of the TV series Monsters.

I think it was while I was reading this collection of short stories that a scary thing happened to me. When I returned to my room after being away, I thought the book was in a different place than where I had left it. It scared me.

 

The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King (from the collection Everything's Eventual)

A man buys a painting from a yard sale. The artist of the painting was said to have been mentally disturbed and killed himself. As the man travels home, the painting changes to reflect the place he has just been. And people start dying in those places. When the man gets home, the road virus also arrives...

There are of course many other disturbing reading experiences, but these were the first ones that came to mind without thinking.

 

Book Review: The Gwendy Trilogy by Stephen King & Richard Chizmar

There are other worlds than these. 

The Gwendy Trilogy (affiliate link) is a collection of three short stories by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar.

In the first, Gwendy's Button Box, Gwendy comes into possession of a mysterious box as a child. It contains a power that could destroy the entire world.

In the second part, written by Chizmar alone, Gwendy is a young, successful politician when the box returns to her life.

The real jackpot for King fans, however, is the final part of the trilogy, Gwendy's Final Task. It is full of references to other works by King, such as It, Pennywise, and The Dark Tower.

I always hate it when covid is included in fictional works, especially knowing King's stance on corona vaccinations. Fortunately, there was no forced vaccination in this collection.

 

 

Stephen King: The Long Walk

One hundred teenage boys participate in a walking race. Only one survives to the finish line. The winner gets everything he wants for the rest of his life.

I had been waiting for decades for Stephen King's The Long Walk (affiliate link) to be made into a movie. This book is one of my favorites in King's work. It had been a long time since I last read it.

After seeing the movie, I started to be bothered by the fact that I remembered so little about the plot of the book. I immediately had to rush online to get it for my computer, since the library doesn't have it (or so I thought). I only succeeded from a third source. Libgen required a login, there was no version to borrow from the Internet Archive. I first downloaded the mobi from Anna's Archive, but Adobe Digital Editions doesn't support it. So I had to download the epub version, and that's when it started working.

It was only afterwards that I discovered that a new Finnish edition/version of The Long March had been published. When I last checked, there wasn't one yet. The book wasn't in the library at all then, but it is now. And it would have been on the shelf when I went to the library just the day before. Damn.

 

This time I paid the most attention to the differences between the book and the movie, and there are plenty of them. The biggest one, of course, is the completely changed ending. As well as the changed personalities and motivations of the characters. Many characters from the book are not in the movie at all, and these characteristics of the deleted characters have been given to other characters. One example of this is Stebbins, who has been given the characteristics of the deleted Scramm: good fitness/muscularity and disease.

Racism. Homophobia. Misogyny. The death of a dog. All of this can be found in The Long Walk.

Even when threatened with death, teenage boys have sex on their minds. And surely that's worth dying for?

VERDICT:

 

 

Terry Hayes: The Year of the Locust

Terry Hayes' The Year of the Locust (affiliate link) is 900 pages long. Literally a really heavy book.

I waited a long time for this book. It was postponed for several years.

And all this time I thought that The Year of the Locust is a sequel to I Am Pilgrim. But it's not. If I had known this, I wouldn't have wanted to read it. I wouldn't have been waiting for it. I wouldn't have bothered dragging this heavy load home from the library.

Reading the book was slow only because I didn't want to pick it up because of its massive size. Too heavy, especially in the summer heat.

So what happens in the book? Again, some CIA agent does some dangerous work, wandering through remote areas and deserts.

But once again I ended up getting interested, and the book and the plot took me with it.

Towards the end, The Year of the Locust changes its genre to something completely different, sci-fi and dystopian. This sudden change in plot and style has angered readers, to say the least.