Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Riding the Bullet by Stephen King

About the Book: Riding the Bullet, the tale of a terrible encounter near a lonely graveyard, is, as the narrator points out, the kind of ghost story told around campfires. It's no surprise that no one tells such a story as well as Stephen King. From the moment Alan, a college student, decides to hitchhike to see his mother in the hospital (his car is out of action) and further decides to avoid the main highway where police might ticket him, you can imagine what's coming, and this makes what does come more awful and delicious. Josh Hamilton can't do a Maine accent (as who can not born to it?), so it's too bad he tried; everything else about this reading is delightful.

From Wikipedia: Riding the Bullet is a novella by Stephen King. This work marks King's debut on the Internet. Simon & Schuster, with technology by SoftLock, first published Riding the Bullet in 2000 as the world's first mass-market electronic book, available for download at $2.50. In 2002, it was collected in King's collection Everything's Eventual.

First Line: I've never told anyone this story, and never thought I would -- not because I was afraid of being disbelieved, exactly, but because I was ashamed...and because it was mine.


My Thoughts: What a scary, fun read. It's pure Steven King to take an ordinary person and put them smack in the middle of a nightmare. Being short I was afraid I would feel the story was incomplete, which is my feeling with most short stories I read. However the entire story is here. It had my heart racing as I flipped pages on my Nook. But as Alan's mother was fond of saying "Fun is fun and done is done." And so it is.

Rating:


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