Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Back to High School With Stephen King

 
I hadn't read Stephen King since high school, when I devoured horror pop-culture classics like The Stand, Night Shift, The Dark Tower, Pet Semetary, It, and Different Seasons.

But when I recently bought an Amazon Kindle, one feature that I realize I love about the e-reader is its ability to download lengthy free samples of books from Amazon. Since I especially liked King's short fiction, I thought I'd sample his new collection, Just After Sunset. But the first story, "Willa," had me hooked and, when the sample ended in the middle, I just had to go ahead and purchase the whole book.

Thus marked my first purchase on the Kindle. Ironically, on Monday, King was Amazon's spokesman in announcing the new Kindle 2.0.

Meanwhile, I'm reading lots of samples on my old-school Kindle 1.0, but still sticking with Just After Sunset. I just finished "The New York Times At Special Bargain Rates," about the widow of a 9/11-like plane-crash victim who receives a haunting call from her husband just prior to his funeral. Many of the stories in this book are very post 9/11, and the author is still clearly a populist master of the pen.

No comments:

Post a Comment