Love the first half of this, which is tense and spooky and brimming with the kinds of chills that arise from knowing that the characters are doomed. Love the Dyatlov Pass references. Love the classic scene with the waitress trying to warn them. Love the anticipation building up almost unbearably until inevitably something horrible happens.

But the second half takes a turn that feels almost cartoony. Sometimes seeing the Big Scary Thing makes horror fall flat for me, and I find it scarier and more effective to languish in wtf-ery for longer. I also wish that the writing were a bit tighter, because the wordiness slows the pace down a lot. The book peters out instead of ending with a punch.

But that first half really is killer.

While some King books are plot books, this one is a character book through and through, and I’ve always thought that King excels with character… especially when writing scrappy little kids who like to try out new cuss words.

I am not sporty, and I think that the baseball element is what made me put off reading this for so long, but you don’t have to know anything about baseball for this book to work.

There are some moments when King gets slightly mystical, which I think is what some people would call “out there.” I, however, love this stuff. I love when a character starts having a transcendental experience and it feels like the fabric of the story has ripped to let you glimpse something bigger and older and scarier underneath. It elicits a very nostalgic kind of fear in me, the original childhood fear of dark gaps in the world and what’s inside them.

Good stuff.

I should start sending this to people who complain to me that Stephen King used to be good but is "too political" now. Lol. Lmfao, even.

I first read Stephen King when I was about 10 or so, but there are a lot of his books that I never got around to. The Dead Zone is one that I passed over back then because it sounded too adult, boring, and yes, political, for my childhood tastes. And you know, good on me back then for having some discernment and realizing that reading a bunch of stuff about Vietnam and Watergate might not be my jam in fifth grade.

But it was my jam at age 35, because Stephen King's concerns about jingoistic populism being spouted by buffoons were prescient, to say the least. This is also a classic good-vs-evil SK epic, with peak levels of characterization and a protagonist who you really want good things for, even though you know that those good things are not going to happen (and that the book would be better for them not). I was a little on the fence about how much I was enjoying this one until the very end, which brought it all together for me.

I can see how this isn’t as rabidly revolutionary as some readers (namely, the kind of leftist who will call you a neoliberal if you vote) might prefer, but I think it’s a valuable, approachable, and level-headed exploration of what we can learn from state socialism’s successes and failures and how we might apply socialist policies to improve women’s material conditions. The author dispels some US propaganda against collectivist ideas without whitewashing the past or engaging in propaganda of her own, and she does so with a concise and engaging writing style.

3.5 stars rounded up. This was more of a straightforward narrative history of the rise of social media platforms and the ways that power users came to define them--and often, to be exploited by the platforms' owners. It was really interesting to see the same patterns play out across platforms, not only in the sense of each one being used in ways that were unexpected and/or unintended, but also in the implications for regular users (the linguistic shift from "friends" to "followers," the increasing pressure for everyone to be a content creator, the shift to video and its impact on how we spend time online now).

There's not much analysis from Lorenz, though, which I felt that the book needed. And as other reviews have noted, the tumblr chapter is weirdly incomplete and totally omits the porn ban that had a huge impact on the platform and chased away users as varied as fanfiction authors and sex workers. It also claims that there have been no changes or "innovations" on the site, ignoring (or unaware of?) the livestreaming feature that caused a ruckus among longtime users when it was rolled out. I mean, I think you could write a whole book just about tumblr, so its near-dismissal struck me as odd. I do concede that the idiosyncratic nature of tumblr "fame" does make it a challenge to fit into the same narrative as other platforms that are more centered on recognizable personalities and don't function with the same anonymity.

This book also made me so nostalgic for the internet circa 2008, oh my god.

Eileen is difficult to rate, because it’s at once a skillfully-rendered character study and one of the most disgusting books I’ve ever read. Impressively bleak, at times darkly funny, with an unsavory protagonist that you can’t help but root for in some way, even as you’re repelled by her.

I loved this book so much that I feel nearly at a loss to articulate why. Febos writes these astute, deeply true essays about growing up and being a woman, relating to her mother, having a body, sex work, and queerness that meander and bring in things that seem unrelated, and she sticks the landing each time. This was my first time reading her work, but now I want to read everything else she’s written.

Love a sexy and scary queer book where the characters definitely need therapy but aren't going to go because that might cut into their banging-an-exorcist-in-the-cab-of-a-truck-in-a-cemetery-with-their-ex-husband's-exhumed-corpse-wrapped-up-in-the-truck-bed time.

Is this the best book I've ever found on Kindle Unlimited? Is it my favorite m/f romance that I've ever read? Is it my favorite book of 2024? I don't know, maybe?? *screams internally*

This is the second book in The Gideon Testaments. I liked the first one quite a bit. But there's just something about Wolf, Willow, Witch. I could not get it into my eyeballs quickly enough to suit me. I wanted to unhinge my jaw and eat my Kindle.

I love pretty much everything about it. I love the writing, especially the dialogue and banter. I love that the romance doesn't overpower the horror and that it's a genuinely creepy book. I love Gunnhild. I love how unabashedly horrible and power-hungry Tehlor and Lincoln are. And I'm shocked to say this, but I love their dynamic and spent the entire book rooting for them to disrespectfully and hatefully [REDACTED] each other's brains out.

I think that when Lincoln said, "I can make you worse," my soul left my body.

And the next book has a sapphic pairing! I cannot express how excited I am to read it.

2.5 rounded up? I feel conflicted about this one. It's almost mis-marketed as a mystery, because it functions more like a women's fiction novel about a bunch of twenty- and thirtysomethings getting their careers and love lives together as a result of a manic pixie dream old lady's meddling, just with a murder as the catalyst for them all meeting her. Anyone expecting a strong investigation, even a strong amateur sleuth investigation, will probably be disappointed, but the tone is a bit too rough at times for this to really count as a cozy. It feels like a very in-between book: in between genres, in between whether I liked it or not. On the upside, though, Vera is a charming character who brings the lion's share of humor and heart to the book. I could have used more chapters from her POV.