State – DaneCobain.com

Dalia Grinkeviciute – Shadows on the Tundra | Review

Title: Shadows on the Tundra

Author: Dalia Grinkeviciute

Type: Non-Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 208

Rating 4.5/5

This book almost didn’t exist, but I’m glad that it does. Grinkeviciute was 14-years-old when the Soviets deported her from her native Lithuania during the 1940s, and she found herself essentially in a work camp in Siberia with people dropping dead left and right around her. She escaped, was caught, and managed to escape again, eventually writing these memoirs and burying them in the back garden in case the Soviet state discovered them. They were eventually found several years after her death.

As you can imagine, that means that it’s a pretty dark read with its fair share of harrowing scenes, and for me it was a lot of the little details that really hit me hard. For example, because they were struggling to survive on the tundra, the ground was frozen solid with permafrost even in the middle of summer, which made it difficult for them to dig graves. One woman was found frozen solid five months after disappearing and when they rolled her over, fresh blood leaked out of her nose. The fact that she survived is nothing short of incredible.

Click here to buy Shadows on the Tundra.

Stephen King – From a Buick 8 | Review

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.