Tag: short stories

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A Book & A Beer – The End of the World As We Know It

I love me a good short story collection and I was so psyched when I saw that there was a new book of short stories in The Stand Universe. The End of the World as We Know It is an ode to the Stephen King book that has been made into not one but two mini-series.

Spearheaded by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene and with some great writers like S.A. Cosby, Paul Temblay and Chuck Wendig, I was so excited to dive into the nooks and crannies of Captain Trips.

Man, was I disappointed. I eventually started putting the 30+ stories into tiers and not good tiers either….

downright mean – Room 24, Every Dog, Make Your Own Way, Milagros, The Legion of Swine, The Boat Man

kernel of an idea – Across the Pond, Grace, The Story I Tell, The Mosque at the End of the World, Came the Last Night of Sadness, The Devil’s Children,

why – In a Pigs Eye, Lenora, The Hope Boat, Prey Instinct, Moving Day, La Mala Hora, The African Painted Dog, Mermaid Story, Keep the Devil Down, Hunted to Extinction, SuperLawyer, Trick Baby

good in comparison – The Tripps, Bright Light City, Lockdown, I Love the Dead, Awaiting Orders in Flaggston, Grand Junction

better by comparison – Wrong Fucking Place, Kovach’s Last Case, Abigail’s Gethsemane, He’s a Righteous Man

I was hoping to see back stories of smaller characters like the Judge or Dana. Or find out more about the government installation where the superflu started, or the recording session for Can You Dig Your Man. What I got was a bushel of apocalyptic stories with very similar structures and outcomes. Person survives, meets another, other people attack. Even the ones set outside the U.S. were boring when it could have used a local flavor to inject new life.

Wish that I could find some positives but there just wasn’t anything close to the original King.

As an antidote to this unrelenting grimness, go buy yourself a few bottles of Maine Beer Co. beers and you will quickly feel good because the beers are so great and it is a strong moral company that even Mother Abigail would approve of.

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A Book & A Beer – You Like It Darker by Stephen King

This is not the first Stephen King book featured in this monthly post and it will probably not be the last as he shows no signs of slowing down.

The latest is a collection of short stories…

The headliner of the piece is The Answer Man (also my favorite piece) where a young man looking to his possible future encounters the Answer Man on the side of the road, then encounters him again many years later and then a third and final time. It has classic King. Witty dialogue, melancholy and coulda – woulda – shoulda too.

The next anticipates piece is a sequel of sorts to Cujo except for snakes instead of a big, big dog. It was fine but I much preferred the punchy and short The Turbulence Expert about a man with a very specific safety job. I also quite enjoyed The Dreamers about sleep experiments gone wrong.

Many of the stories are set in Florida so if you can get a Florida Weisse style beer that would be a start. Or playing off the title, find something darker. Maybe a dark Bock beer.

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A Book & A Beer – Full Throttle by Joe Hill

I am a fan of short stories and horror short stories are even better. Then add in that two of the stories in the Full Throttle collection from Joe Hill are co-written with his dad, Stephen King and you know you are in for some frights and dread.

Strangely though, I was most affected by the author’s foreword where he talks about his dad and other mentors in his life and especially by the less than a page story in the notes, A Little Sorrow. I re-read that piece many times before returning the book to the library.

In the meat of the book, All I Want is You is one of my picks, very Gaiman-esque but with a nasty little twist that is pure King brutalism. Late Returns, though a bit maudlin was also a nice ghost story turned to a different angle. The social media Twitter/Zombie story moved at a breakneck pace that I liked even though the ending was a bit predictable.

With short stories, you will find the “not my taste” pieces too. Read 10 reviews and I bet the favorite and least favorite will be drastically different. Faun, was a little too on point for me and the Dark Carousel was kind of overly predictable in the plot.

You can have fun with choices for horror stories and the beers to drink with them. Find a nice sour Allagash beer and sip while you read. Or if you want to create your own jump scares, get a coffee beer and let the caffeine do the work. Another good choice would be to find a Rose beer, Crooked Stave Sour Rose and pretend it is a different liquid.