Review: From Red Adept Reviews: Mile 81
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 17, 2011
(Note: This is a joint review with Lynn O'Dell of RAR)Michelle: I've heard good things about this writer and thought I might give him a shot. (Kidding.) I'd preordered it and had it delivered to my Kindle right when it was released.Lynn: I've been a fan of Stephen King since I was a kid. I couldn't pass up this short story. I, too, preordered it.Description:Michelle: Since the Amazon description is longer than the story and gives away pretty much everything, let me try. Pete Simmons, a ten-year-old boy, sneaks into an abandoned rest stop, while unbeknownst to him, all hell is breaking loose outside, due to a seemingly sentient muddy station wagon. The moral: Almost no good deed goes unpunished, unless you're pre-pubescent.Overall:  Michelle: 4  StarsLynn: 4 StarsPlot/Storyline:  Michelle: 4  starsLynn: 4 StarsMichelle: You can't say that Stephen King doesn't cop to the resemblance this story has to earlier works. To quote: "Jim Golding hadn't believed in monster cars since he saw that movie Christine as a kid, but he believed that sometimes monsters could lurk in cars."Stephen King has gone back to the scary-car well for, I believe, the third time. (This is not to be confused with the scary well well.) For the most part, it works. All I know is I spent most of the story wishing I could make various characters stop approaching the car, not to mention be able to translate the warning of a six-year-old girl. When she says, "It's sticky," she means it.I have to give credit for the abandoned rest stop setting that allowed so much to go so wrong within close proximity of passing cars. Rather than this providing help, it seems to only serve to draw in fresh victims. The death count... is not exactly low.Lynn: Stephen King generally delivers some great horror. I have to admit that when it came to his depicting another scary car, I was concerned that it would end up as another From a Buick 8, the only novel of his that I will never reread and would rate with two stars. Fortunately, this one, while not reaching the level of Christine by any stretch of the imagination (pun intended), at least was a good read with an ending, though not a particularly satisfying one.I had a couple of small issues with the book. I won't go into detail on either to avoid spoilers. First, though I'm not personally familiar with the back of a police car, I'm pretty sure the rear doors don't open from the inside. Second, if something can roll somewhere, I would assume it could roll again.My larger issue was with the ending, which bordered on the ridiculous. However, I took it much in the same way I withstood the ending of It, the part with the asthma inhaler.Michelle: You make some good points. I didn't even think of the police car door thing.  You're right that King was reaching on that ending. The difference is that in IT there was a clearly established theme of childhood belief being magic/magical and even the adult characters needed to revert back in order to battle Pennywise. King does this a fair amount. Here though, he didn't quite make that link. He directly stated that the saving grace for Pete was his youth -- and by extension his ability to still believe the unbelievable. This saved him from making the same mistakes the adults made. That's different though from his "solution," which seemed to be not so much about childhood magic as it was, well, science applied to science fiction.Characters:  Michelle: 4  StarsLynn: 4  StarsMichelle: King has always had a knack for introducing a lot of characters and giving us nice little snapshots into their lives so that we understand perfectly who they are and what they fear. This is a short story where he had to do this over half a dozen times. There were moments where the kids seemed almost too precocious, and Pete perhaps seems like he belonged to an earlier generation, but these are small complaints.Lynn: I loved the horse woman. She was vintage King. The other characters weren't as imaginative as I'm used to from him, but they weren't bad, either. My only character problem was with the six year old immediately knowing a ten-year-old was worried about alcohol on his breath.Michelle: I loved the horsewoman, too! I think Rachel figuring out Pete's concern was supposed to be surprising. Precocity by design, as opposed to an error in characterization. That moment didn't bother me as much as the rest, where I was simply expected to believe she was just old for her age. It reminded me  a little of our recent discussion of the Koontz book (What The Night Knows) where all the kids were embarrassingly perfect little forty year olds who discussed art and literature at the dinner table. King wasn't quite that bad.Writing style:  Michelle: 4  StarsLynn: 3  StarsMichelle: It feels weird to judge the style of the author I've read since I was a kid in the late seventies. Ha, imagine being his editor. His style was, to be expected, quite good. If I'm being honest though, there were moments when it all felt a little rote.Reading King is like catching up with a friend, reconnecting with someone who has been part of my life since I was too young to understand the shower scene in Carrie. When I step back from this, I can say that this is not his best work, not by a long shot, and not even his best short story involving a child protagonist. (For that, I'd suggest The Man in the Black Suit.) Still, this was time well spent, and the price was right.Lynn: I have to agree here. The story was good and well worth the money, but the writing style appeared to be a little forced, especially the parenthetical interjections.My other problem came with the severe head hopping. I'm used to King telling his stories from different viewpoints. That's actually something I really enjoy about his work. However, in this story, he not only hopped around, he didn't do it very smoothly. He even had one flashback where the character who had the memory knew something he couldn't have known, making it seem as though the story were some kind of weird cross between omniscient and third person.Michelle: I missed that moment. I prefer that an author avoids head hopping, but beyond that, I think it simply works better for the more experienced writer.  If King can screw it up, anyone can -- and most people do.