Cover art is by Ray Russotto and it's a great caricature. I wish it was on a t-shirt. It probably is.

The contents of the book is packed with essays regarding a love for Stephen King. All these authors spoke for all of us. Interesting insights and anecdotes. A big helping of food-for-thought.

The only other thing I'll add is an open letter to Mick Garris:

Dearest Mr. Garris:

I will read your script for The Talisman. I will give you the praise and love you deserve. Totally platonic of course.

I want you to know, while the powers-that-be may be blind to the brilliance I know you brought to this work, Joe Blow Constant Reader (me) will see and appreciate that brilliance, right here and now.

Shoot me an email. Or we can FaceTime. What fun! We'll talk. Okay, you'll talk. I'll just sit there with a moronic look on my face and nod a lot. And my mouth will dry out and my lip with sort of curl up and stick to my teeth -- that is a smile, not insanity.

With the utmost respect,

Dana Jean ( )

Review also posted on my blog: https://bennilovesbooks.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/review-reading-stephen-king-edi...

I read an ARC of this book before it released, but I also pre-ordered a copy before I knew I was getting an ARC, and then I ended up with another copy from a grab bag box. So now I have an ARC, a signed hardcover, and a regular hardcover. Oops.

How has Stephen King affected your life? For me, he first dropped into it when my partner sent me a photo of a pile of approximately 45 Stephen King books back in high school.

I distinctly remembered replying to that text with “0.o That’s a lot of Stephen King books…” He had ended up with his mother’s collection, and by doing so he brought King into both of our lives. We went from that one pile to almost two full sets of King’s novels (my collection is a bit bigger, but we’re more than happy to share with each other so we can buddy read the ones we both have or pass back and forth the ones we don’t). We’re still working our way through them; he’s going through The Dark Tower series, and I’m going to be reading Under the Dome next. These books, both the ones we like and the ones we don’t, have led to some of our stranger conversations, and we’ve bonded over them.

Questions like this one are the kinds of questions that the essays in Reading Stephen King were based on. Each essay tells the story of a writer’s own interactions with King and his work, and I loved reading all of them. A few highlights:

-“Sometimes You Go Back” by Stewart O’Nan opens the collection by bringing in the feeling of nostalgia from a person’s first King books, and as someone who clearly relates to this I felt like this was an excellent way to open up the book.

-“Disappearing Down That Rabbit Hole” by Justin Brooks starts with the line “Let’s get it all out there in the open: collectors are a weird bunch.” After reading this essay, I’m more than a little inclined to agree. This is a look into the world of collecting King’s work from a variety of perspectives; with all of the smaller pieces and lost work that’s out there in the world, it’s not as easy as you might think at first. My eyes kept getting wider and wider as I read this, and after I finished this essay I had to stare off into space a bit to digest all of the complexities involved.

-“Reading the Lost Works of Stephen King” by Rocky Wood discusses a bit more narrowly that notion of reading all of King’s work by focusing on a few certain pieces that are unavailable to the general public and yet not entirely unattainable. Another excellent look at reading deeper into King’s work.

-“Being a Non-US Stephen King Fan” by Hans-Áke Lilja was probably my favorite essay in the whole collection because while many other essays focused on work that wasn’t generally readable by people, this essay focused on just how hard it can be to get ahold of books when you’re not in the country the author lives in or you can’t read in English, and it involves a lot of waiting. This is something that gets forgotten far too often, and reading Lilja’s perspective was something I greatly appreciated.

I loved this essay collection overall, and I think it’s a wonderful treat for any King fan.

Final rating: 5 of 5 stars ( )