A look at the rest of the year.

My mistake. This Amazon ad for The Walking Dead should be with the previous posting, not this one. I apologize for that.

Anyway, I've pulled about twenty-five books out the fifteen boxes I have stacked up in my new small apartment. These are the ones I intend of reading this year. Though there are books here by Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum, Tom Piccirelli (I hope I spelled that right Tom), Dean Koontz, Robert McCammon, and a few others, I'm primarily going back and re-reading Stephen King's earlier novels, starting with Salem's Lot. I've been feeling a strong urge to do that for the past year. I want to re-read these and see if they affect me the same as they did thirty-five years ago. I guess I want to relieve my past a little, too. I'm sixty years old and I have no idea how much time I have left with my health the way it is. It could be a year, or ten years. I simply don't know. Anticipating a new King novel each year was the highlight of my life at that time. Hell, in many ways it still is, though there are other authors I now look forward to each year.

What I do know is that I need to reconnect with some of the books by King like Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, The Tommyknocker, It, and certainly The Dark Tower series. I only finished the first two of those and still have at least four left to read, plus a new Dark Tower novel coming out at the end of this year or early 2012.

I've already started Salem's Lot. I'm a hundred pages into the novel and loving it. What many people probably never realized (I know I didn't) is that the description of Ben Mears in the novel isn't that of David Soul or Rob Lowe, but rather of Stephen King himself--tall, lanky, pale, with black wavy hair that looks as though a hand was used to brush it and not a comb. I'm reminded of what the great, late John D. MacDonald said of King in the introduction to Night Shift. He mentioned how jealous he was of a young man writing so well. John at been at it for at least twenty years, where as King only had three novels published. I can see that special gift King has clearly in the writing of Salem's Lot. Though King has certainly gotten even better during the years, Salem's Lot showed the future of horror fiction, and its name was Stephen King. The Maestro has never let me down with one of his novels (we'll see about the rest of The Dark Tower series). He has been the one constant factor in my life since 1976.

Last, I still have Devil Red to read by Joe Lansdale when I get it in this week. I want to spend some more time with the boys and to eat more Vanilla cookies and to drink a six-pack of Dr. Pepper. After that, it's pretty much a horror festival for the next several months. I intend on writing reviews of Salem's Lot, The Shining, and The Stand. I want to talk about how these novels changed my life and made me want to be a writer...maybe not a great writer, but one who can tell good stories and entertain the readers. I suspect Stephen King will never know how many people who's life he changed with his fiction. Probably thousands and thousands. All he ever wanted to do was to write stories that people would read and to hopefully make enough money to support his family. See, dreams do come true, and hope is good thing, perhaps the best of things!