A house fire? Near all that uranium they've been mining? Probably releasing it in powdered form accidentally because god knows no one in this weird ass town would know a safety procedure if it slapped them on the ass. They're fucking lucky the whole town didn't go up in flames.

Mike, being an idiot, is somehow excited by the idea that his house and all his possessions are gone, never once thinking about the strain it will put on his poverty-stricken single mother. His mother who probably dreams about dumping him down one of the mine shafts and leaving the state to go open a pie shop.

Alas, Mike's mother, he is alive and well and still quite irritating.

It amuses me, a little bit, that the first Stephen King novel I ever read was the one least sunk in the supernatural.

I don't think I was aware, really, of how much of Stephen King's work was built into our pop culture when I first picked this up out of my grandmother's book pile during a "camping trip" when I was twelve or so. I hate camping, always have, but as a child, your interests in such things mean much less to your parents. Regardless, camping with my grandparents was actually hanging out with them in their tiny RV in a park filled with other old people in RVs. Just me and a bunch of 65+ couples. That's the dream.

So naturally I read anything and everything I could get my hands on to stave off a neverending stream of good-natured, but incredibly boring conversation. Ta-da! (This was also the summer I discovered my grandmother had a taste for smutty bodice rippers, but that's another story)

There was something about the set up of Dolores Claiborne that I was immediately drawn into, though King's easy prose can also be credited. The confessional style wasn't unfamiliar to me, though I had yet to really get into my current interest of crime novels. One of my favorite childhood series, The Animorphs, was also written as if telling the audience secrets with growing tension and maturity of content. Completely different tone and genre, but ultimately similar (in my mind, anyway).

One very specific thing I remember about this novel over fifteen years later is Dolores' youthful fascination for her future husband's forehead. Why? God only knows - the laws of attraction are a mystery to me even at the advanced age of twenty-nine.

And when [Joe] asked me to the Junior-Senior Prom, I said yes, and I got my chance to touch his forehead, and it was every bit as smooth as it looked ... Accourse I found m'self touchin a lot more than just his forehead before too many more weeks had passed and that was where I made my mistake.

And down the rabbit hole we go.

Quite a few parts of this short book have stuck with my throughout the years, like this ditty about positive thinking:

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

And of course, whenever I see a man with a prodigious beard, I always think of Mr. Twit and his disgusting habits.

this is some very emotionally manipulative white savior literature, right here.

Such a guilty pleasure. I've probably reread this series half a dozen times. There's a lot of things to be said about Sookie's character, but there's something about her that I just really like. To me, she's a very good mix of realistic heroine and paranormal trouble magnet.

I related to this far more than any of the coming-of-age books with female protagonists. I'm still trying to pinpoint why.