The Girl Who Loved Stephen King

The next two stories on my list don't have a huge amount in common, but I've popped these two together because I thought both were a little thin, like snippets of much bigger ideas. Many of these early King stories have felt like practice runs for his bigger novels, and perhaps that's what some of them are. It Grows on You It wasn't that I didn't like  It Grows on You , exactly, I just couldn't quite work out where it was going. Just as with Night Surf , four years earlier, I felt like this was more a collection of interesting ideas and a concept that King wanted to explore, but couldn't quite get a handle on. The story is the first set in King's famous fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, and is told through the gossipy old man conversations of a small group in a general store. The town of Castle Rock is dying, but the Newall house, visible from the store, is alive and growing. It's a house with a history of death and devastation; among other ...

The next two stories on the extensive first list were easy to slot together; they share similar characters, similar ideas, a similar vibe . The only major difference, other than obvious content-based ones, is that I really liked one and really hated the other. The Fifth Quarter I'm going to start this by saying I am a bit of a King purist; I don't gravitate towards work that is out of his normal zone. I haven't read all of the Dark Towers  series, for example (don't hurt me, I promise I will!), and I wasn't particularly enamoured with the Bill Hodges trilogy. I like King horror. Of course, there are exceptions, like the unquestinably wonderful Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption , but generally, you'll find my favourites sitting comfortably in the horror section of the bookshop. The Fifth Quarter  is a gangster story . In it, Jerry Tarkanian (the first of several ridiculously over the top gangster names) hunts down the men who killed his friend, an...

This is one of the few stories in this early selection that I remembered just based on the title. With most of the others ( Battleground, The Mangler  and Trucks  being the exceptions), I only realised I'd read them already once I began. This one, though. Oh, boy. This one gave me nightmares. I was excited to read Suffer the Little Children again partly just to see if it still had that effect on me. I first read it when I was about twelve, and I knew picking it up this time that my view of it was likely to be shifted significantly by adulthood. Suffer the Little Children This little gem is the story of Miss Emily Sidley, and elderly first grade teacher, who begins to feel as though her students have changed and are now watching her with evil intent. The ringleader, Robert, taunts her, even beginning to change and show her his new, real face; a terrifying, alien face which sends Miss Sidley screaming into the streets and almost under the wheels of a bus. The story end...