Established – DaneCobain.com

Title: The Outsider

Author: Stephen King

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 486

Rating: 3.5/5

The thing with The Outsider is that I feel as though it would have been pretty good if just anyone had written it, but the problem is that it’s pretty poor for a Stephen King book. It was competently written and I kept on reading, but it didn’t really contain anything to surprise or impress me.

Part of the reason for that is that I’m not much of a fan of when King does crime, mostly because I can’t help feeling that the point of crime is that it’s based on reality, and so as soon as he adds the inevitable supernatural elements, I start to lose interest in the story. It’s a bit like trying to play Cluedo with someone who makes up the rules as they go along.

It’s also the unofficial fourth book in the Bill Hodges trilogy, a mini-series that started off well but which immediately took a dive as soon as the supernatural elements kicked in. I quite liked Bill Hodges as a character, but Hodges is dead by this point and so we have to make do with Holly Gibney, who I liked in the previous books but who I found kind of annoying here. It was also a bit weird how she just randomly shows up half way through the story, way after all of the other characters have been introduced and established.

Other than that though, it’s pretty much positive, and I liked the way that King eventually explained all of the supernatural elements. The bad guy wasn’t necessarily as terrifying as the Walken Dude, but he was still pretty intimidating in a way that was terrifyingly human. In a way, it almost feels realer than a lot of his other monsters too, perhaps because of the setting and the explanation.

Then there are the main characters, with Ralph and Howie standing out for me in particular. That’s one of the good things about reading King – you know that you’re always going to get some pretty good characterisation. Everyone felt pretty fledged out, and I don’t have any complaints to speak of. I was just hoping for something a little more, even though I’d been warned by the reviews that it wasn’t the best King book on the market.

Would I recommend it? I mean yeah, but mainly because I recommend King in general. It doesn’t make sense to get to this one ahead of the other three books in the Bill Hodges series, and to be honest I wouldn’t even recommend those over some of King’s old school classics. But it’s worth picking up eventually or if you see it going second hand in a charity shop. And I’m glad that I’m that one step closer to finishing every book he’s ever written. So what’s next?

Click here to learn more about The Outsider.

Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – The Long War | Review

Title: The Long War

Author: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 512

Rating 3.75/5

This book wasn’t as good as the first book in the series, but it wasn’t a total failure either. It’s also going to be difficult for me to review, because as the second book in the series, I can’t say a huge amount about it without spoiling both this book and the one before it. It was pretty good though, even if “The Long War” is a bit of a misnomer because no shots were fired. It was kind of anticlimactic in that way.

It was also a little jarring because a big chunk of time has passed between the end of the last book and the start of this one. Joshua Valiente has married Helen, who was a little girl during the first book, and so it almost feels a little bit wrong. I’m not entirely sure what the age difference is, but it has to be a fair amount.

The Long War was also longer than the first book, and I feel like it suffered because of it. It was dragging by the end, and I ended up skim reading the last fifty pages or so, at least until something big happened right at the end. Unfortunately, that’s starting to feel a little bit old and worn, because the same thing happened in the first book. I’m now fully expecting it to happen in books three and four as well. Sure, it’s not unusual for books in a series to set the next book up, but at the same time the events at the end of the first two books are so apocalyptic that they really need a rapid follow-up.

On the plus side, I did enjoy reading it and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, even though it’s starting to feel as though none of the original characters are even left. In many ways, that doesn’t matter, because I’m more interested in the ideas that the book has to share than I am in the characters or even in what actually happens. I’ve been consistently impressed throughout this series by the way in which it uses popular science and psychology while simultaneously telling a cracking story.

Then there’s the way it taps into mythology, albeit in quite a subtle way. As people explore various corners of The Long Earth, they also find new types of creatures, including the elves and the trolls that we met in the first book. But they have little in common with the established mythology, and really the terms are just used as a way to give things a label. It’s a nice little nod to fantasy from within a science fiction novel though, and it was cool to meet kobolds. I feel like they’re an underrated fantasy creature, and even though the creatures here weren’t true kobolds, they were interesting enough on their own.