What Not To Read on a Fourteen Hour Flight<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I wrote this review of Stephen King's Everything's Eventual in March of 2013. Reading this book was a mistake. You almost certainly misunderstood that\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/crywoof\/2013\/11\/what-not-to-read-on-a-fourteen-hour-flight\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"What Not To Read on a Fourteen Hour Flight\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I wrote this review of Stephen King's Everything's Eventual in March of 2013. Reading this book was a mistake. 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{"id":634,"date":"2013-11-16T03:44:47","date_gmt":"2013-11-16T08:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/crywoof\/?p=634"},"modified":"2013-11-15T20:06:15","modified_gmt":"2013-11-16T01:06:15","slug":"what-not-to-read-on-a-fourteen-hour-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/crywoof\/2013\/11\/what-not-to-read-on-a-fourteen-hour-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"What Not To Read on a Fourteen Hour Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I like Stephen King. He\u2019s a darn good story teller, and he\u2019s darn good at evoking just the response he wants (which, it seems to me, isn\u2019t quite the same thing). I use to buy all of his books as they came out, until I got to Insomnia<\/i>, which was frankly a waste of time. He told the story well, but the story itself was too silly for words. After that I more or less stopped buying him, and even got rid of all but my favorite books by him.<\/p>\n

I kept all of his short story collections. He\u2019s a darn good story teller. So when I saw Everything\u2019s Eventual<\/i> at the bookstore and realized it was a new collection, I almost bought it. Almost, but not quite. I wasn\u2019t in a buying mood, and I wasn\u2019t in a Stephen King mood.<\/p>\n

Well, then came the day when I was to leave for Australia. I didn\u2019t much want to go, so I was in a foul mood. And then I came across this book again, at the airport, and thought it would distract me a bit, and so I bought it and started reading it in lieu of the book I\u2019d brought for the trip.<\/p>\n

That was the mistake.<\/p>\n

See, when you write a horror novel you can make it as scary and awful as you like, and still provide a bit of a happy ending after all of that catharsis. When you write a short story in the same genre, you mostly can\u2019t\u2013there\u2019s not time or space. Reading a short horror story is something like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer, because it feels so good when you stop. The horrible thing happened to someone else, someone you don\u2019t know, someone who isn\u2019t even real.<\/p>\n

If you read a horror anthology straight through in one sitting, it doesn\u2019t stop. You just keep getting hit with that hammer through story after story. It\u2019s enough to make a guy feel really lousy, and indeed that\u2019s usually the effect a Stephen King collection has on me if I\u2019m stupid enough (after all this time) to read it that way.<\/p>\n

I started reading Everything\u2019s Eventual<\/i> in the terminal. I continued reading it on the plane. And when I finished a story, I was still on the plane, with many hours to go (it was a fourteen-and-a-half-hour flight) before I got to Australia, feeling cramped, confined, and really out-of-sorts about leaving my family.<\/p>\n

I guess you could say that the book fit my mood\u2026but on the whole I\u2019d have been better off with something cheerful. At the very least, I didn\u2019t do the stories justice, reading them that way.<\/p>\n

Which is a pity, because it\u2019s really a rather good book, if you like that sort of thing.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"