Postscript – DaneCobain.com

Title: From a Buick 8

Author: Stephen King

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 408

Rating: 4*/5

Stephen King – From a Buick 8

I started reading this one on a train journey home and then had to put it down for a few weeks about a third of the way through so that I could read the books that were shortlisted for the Young Writer of the Year award. I worried that I’d struggle to get back into it, but it turned out to be pretty easy – mainly because the story itself is relatively straightforward.

This book follows the story of a bunch of cops from the Pennsylvania State Police when they find themselves in possession of a strange car that seems to have some sort of unique evil, which spreads out from Shed B where they store it and spans a period of twenty years or so. The narrative follows the police chief’s son as he uncovers the truth about the Buick in Shed B and the role that his father played in keeping it under control.

It’s not the best Stephen King book there is, but it’s still a pretty good read and I like how it sort of disrupts the classic haunted house trope by portraying a haunted car instead. I also liked how King’s postscript explained how the story came about, because it’s pretty easy to follow his thought process and as an author, I like to see how stuff like this is created.

Stephen King

One problem that I did have is that after a while, it started to get kind of repetitive. The whole plot is basically that the Buick does some weird stuff, then it goes quiet, then it does some more weird stuff and then it goes quiet again. But that was kind of offset by the fact that by skipping all of the in-between bits, it was pretty much all action. King has a habit of delving too deeply into characters‘ pasts when it isn’t necessarily relevant to the story, but if anything, the opposite was true in this one.

Overall then, this is a pretty good book, but at the same time it has nothing on King’s classics. It feels almost as though he’s imitating himself, although I guess the problem he faces is how to stay ‘original‘ with so many books under his belt. This one is original, i just doesn’t stand out. He’s still better than most other writers, though.

Stephen King Quote

Click here to buy From a Buick 8.

John Grogan – Marley & Me | Review

Title: Marley & Me

Author: John Grogan

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 372

Rating: 8/10

John Grogan – Marley & Me

A few of my friends seemed surprised when I started reading this, but I’m not really sure why. True, the movie (starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson) has a reputation as something of a chick-flick, but I just saw it as a bestselling piece of non-fiction, and it’s certainly true that as you read through it, it just reads like a well-written memoir.

A memoir about a dog called Marley of course, but still a memoir. In fact, Grogan also talks about his family life, including the birth of his kids and the trials and tribulations that he and his wife experience along the way. In the postscript to the book, he explains that the two are interlinked – you can’t tell the story of Marley the dog without telling the story of the Grogan family, and you can’t tell the story of the Grogan family without telling the story of Marley the dog.

Of course, the book comes with the obligatory photos that you often see in a non-fiction book like this, and they work well because they help you to imagine what Marley looks like. And it’s not that Grogan does a bad job of depicting him throughout the book – it’s just that he’s even better at showing Marley’s personality, and so it’s easier to focus on reading about that while looking at the photos to get a well-rounded view of the beloved family pet.

John Grogan

Grogan is a journalist by trade, which means that he has plenty of practice at stringing words together to tell an evocative story. In fact, the book itself came about after he wrote a column about Marley’s death for the paper that he worked at and received a phenomenal response from the general public, who responded with their own stories about their beloved family pets.

And that’s the thing about this book. If you love animals – and dogs in particular – then you’re going to find something in the story for you to relate to. I don’t have a dog, but I’d love to have one, one day – just maybe one that’s a little bit smaller than Marley.