King’s gone loony, and it shows in his book.
Duma Key had a few anti-Bush slaps, but “Under the Dome” was insane. Pastors cooking and dealing meth, while the insanely right-wing town boss controls the town and the northeast drug trade. He even has a signed picture of Sarah Palin on his desk.
Of course, the heroes are a disaffected Iraq vet (of course), and a liberal-leaning “republican” newspaper owner/editor and a female pastor of a unitarian-style church.
I’d love to see King try to logically defend his viewpoints and get his ass handed to him.
I wonder if he’s even writing the books being published under his name now? I have read virtually every novel he wrote from Carrie to From a Buick 8, Bag of Bones...about the year 2000-2002. While he’s no Tolstoy, his works show a steady improvement in professionalism and polish : Even Salem’s Lot and The Shining are incomparably better written than Carrie. And then I got The Cell...I really don’t believe for a second that SK wrote that book . It read almost like a parody of SK’s writing style, written by a person with marginal at best writing ability, trying to imitate the tropes and idiom’s of SK’s work. And getting those tropes wrong : What was with the ALL CAPS listing for brand names? And his male protagonists ...They have never been stupid or neanderthal/macho, but they also haven’t burst into tears constantly , sometimes more than once in the same chapter. And suddenly SK is writing about a 20something artist, when his protaganists have been aging along with him, sometimes being older than is SK himself? And SK’s done gay characters before, but this one (a male secondary named Tom IIRC) seemed oddly tacked on, like his gayness was part of a checklist system of writing a Guaranteed Blockbuster. I checked out the reviews at various sites, and I was gratified to see that others had had the exact same thought : As one reviewer put it, “I don’t know who wrote this book, but it wasn’t King, and whoever wrote it sucks!” There have been rumors that Tabitha King has written some of SK’s works (Rose Madder and Gerald’s Game , maybe a few more ) and the sheer number and size of the books ( sometimes three huge ones in one year) have seemed suspicious to some, but The Cell is the first work of SK that I’ve read which didn’t seem to be written by the same person (whoever s/he is...) who wrote The Stand , The Shining, The Dead Zone, or even the last (and least) novels in the Gunslinger series.