A Reader’s Journey: 2025
Been a year, huh?
I’ve been doing these Reader’s Journeys for over a dozen years now and it’s something I greatly enjoy. It’s fun to talk books, even when the audience is invisible (but I know you’re out there.) Over the years, the introduction to these posts has gone from virtually nonexistent to an essay in its own right. Last year, for the first time, I struggled with what to say before the Muse helpfully jumped in and told me to write about that very struggle.
This year, though…this year not even the Muse is seeing me through. It’s not that there’s nothing to talk about. There is plenty. The problem is that it all feels so big and heavy and endlessly morphing that I can’t even get a hook into it. Two years ago I wrote about AI in this very column and that post is now woefully outdated. I could write about AI again—it’s far and away the most important topic for readers of all stripes in 2025—but anything I say will probably be outdated between the time I write this and the time I publish. That doesn’t stop me, but the utterly depressing nature of the topic does.
Personally, I’ve not had a great year. Most people I know have not had a great year. Reading is one of the few tools I have to combat the darkness, depression and hopelessness that comes too easily these days. Dwelling on how AI is doing its best to destroy meaningful reading is just not somewhere I can go today. Yet it makes any other topic seem small. At one point I had a draft of fun little fragments for this space, a respite from the all too pervasive darkness, but I just couldn’t make it sing.
Readers, friends: light a candle. Don’t let the darkness eat you up. It’s ok to disconnect when it gets too much. Tell your loved ones that you love them. Give hugs – especially you dudes who don’t give hugs. Listen to the wind, to the rain. We are alone – we are not alone. One small step of kindness at a time.
Apologies for the PSA. But you matter. AI can’t replace you. Capitalism can’t replace you. Bloviating politicians can’t own you. Social media can’t control you.
You matter.
Let’s chat about some books.
Housekeeping
If you're new to Reader's Journey, welcome! As mentioned above, I've been doing these for over a decade and you can find the last seven years on this site. A couple of notes regarding what I cover and I how I do this:
These are not meant to be comprehensive or proper reviews. Or really reviews at all. There are a million sites that provide those. Rather, this is a freeform gathering of musings about the books I read in the last year.
The list is limited to newly read novels, collections and non-fiction books. I generally don't include re-reads (I did make one exception this year) or other formats, if only because I have to draw the line somewhere.
I don’t cover every book on my list – just those that spark a thought or two.
I generally don't write up non-fiction, even though I read plenty. Musing about fiction is my métier.
Horror/weird fiction is the genre I’m most steeped in – in part because I write it too – but I believe reading in just one genre is horribly restrictive and boring. I read all over the place, all over the years. And the older I get, the less I like the concept of genre in general. It’s nice way to shelve books but it should never limit exploration or imagination.
King of the Hill is my annual segment covering what Stephen King and Joe Hill published in the last year. I’ve been one of King’s Constant Readers since discovering Christine in the basement of a dingy small-town library; I believe there are only three of his novels I’ve yet to read. I’ve been a fan of his progeny Joe Hill since before I knew he was King’s progeny; 20th Century Ghosts is still my favorite short fiction collection of this century.
Questions? Thoughts? Arguments? Ghosts for the offering? Leave a comment or reach out via my contact form. I’m always happy to hear from folks!
Books Read in the Past Year
Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield
Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany, Harald Jähner
Life Itself, Roger Ebert
The Complete Maus, Art Spiegelman
La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman
The Secret Commonwealth, Philip Pullman
A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher
The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman
The Bella Vista: Poems, Emma Ruth Rundle
Crom Cruach, Valkyrie Loughcrewe
Haunted Ecologies, Corey Farrenkopf
Old Soul, Susan Barker
The Lonely Lands, Ramsey Campbell
The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami
Lollapalooza: The Uncensored Story of Alternative Rock's Wildest Festival, Richard Bienstock, Tom Beaujour
A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden, the Hard Way, Gary Holt
Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture, Grace Elizabeth Hale
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Ghost Wall, Sarah Moss
Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson
Room to Dream, David Lynch
Ice, Anna Kavan
The Devil Takes You Home, Gabino Iglesias
Never Flinch, Stephen King
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones
Hangsaman, Shirley Jackson
Rest Stop, Nat Cassady
The Divinity Student, Michael Cisco
Minor Detail, Adania Shibli
Girl in the Creek, Wendy N. Wagner
The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong
Did You Ever Have A Family, Bill Clegg
Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Film Career of Tony Tenser, John Hamilton
Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, Jasper Sharp
Tonight It’s A World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics, Bill Peel
King Sorrow, Joe Hill
The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher
Issues with Authority, Nadia Bulkin
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence, Becky Cooper
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
At last, it has happened. Stephen Graham Jones, one of the most important horror voices of this young century, has finally written a complete novel. An amazing novel, even.
I have long held much admiration for SGJ as a writer and vocal champion of the horror genre. To my taste, though, his work has been a mixed bag – some of right up my alley, some not to my interest at all. That’s all well and good. But regardless of subject matter, his stories always feel so damn incomplete. Jones races through his stories (novels especially) as though he’s too impatient to get to the next tale before finishing the current one. Basically, his work usually reads one draft short of completion, lacking the final polish, continuity check and tightening of prose essential to a fully realized story. Not so in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.
Visibility-wise, the book is the most prominent in the genre this year (read any one of those endless “best books of 2025” listicles and you’ll inevitably find The Buffalo Hunter Hunter as the token horror offering.) That would have been the case regardless – a new standalone SGJ novel is always an event. More thrilling is that The Buffalo Hunter Hunter has a strong argument for being the best novel in the genre this year. This is a vivid, engrossing, evocative tale with a strong political subtext. Subtext, you ask? It’s right on the surface! It is, yes, but not at the expense of the horror of the tale itself, which would be scary even without the cultural context. Or would it? Honestly, I don’t know – I can’t picture the book without it. How about we just say it’s a complex book that works on multiple levels, yet keeps the reader engaged through sheer clarity of focus.
Lack of polish, pacing issues? Those familiar bugaboos are nowhere to be found in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. My sole qualm is with the wraparound—the ending half in particular, which I found unnecessary and uninteresting. But in the Year of Our Horror 2025 it has been decreed that all horror novels—relatively popular ones, anyway—must be tied up in a neat bow and The Buffalo Hunter Hunter doesn’t buck the trend. This can easily be forgiven, given the novel’s virtues. At the end of the day, I just pretend the book ends with the perfect last paragraphs of Arthur Beaucarne’s journal. And when I do that, I get the special haunting chill that only the best novels of the genre achieve, a delightful shiver accompanying the existential desolation. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is an impressive achievement from a beloved horror stalwart.
Crom Cruach
In many ways, the last two decades have been a golden age for horror/weird literature. Such a golden age does not come without cost, though. One of those costs is an insularity that has developed around both writers and the larger genre culture (conventions, awards, etc.) No matter how talented these authors are, a certain sameness of tone and approach has increasingly pervaded the works from many of the most prominent/elevated in the last few years. This makes sense – these writers work the same circuits, many are friends, many beta read each other’s works and make cute references to each other in their tales. Many are now trying to reach wider audiences via screenplays, comics and other formats and are not necessarily focused on novels.
Inevitably, this leads to a taming – a smoothing out, if you will – of once raw voices. This does not have to be a bad thing. A novel can synthesize these elements and, when married with a strong storytelling vision, create something unique and powerful. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, discussed above, is a perfect example. One thing all of these works are, including The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, is safe. They are, in a sense, products of a community – inside voices as opposed to outside.
It's important, for this reader at least, to find voices outside of that community. Voices that experiment, that are creative expressions first and foremost, voices that unsettle, disturb and provoke. We find such a voice in Valkyrie Loughcrewe’s novella in verse Crom Cruach. This disturbed, grisly, hallucinatory tale is not going to make an appearance in the comfy confines of the Bram Stoker Awards. It cares not a whit for your nicely plotted New Weird screenplay. It is too busy turning your understanding of reality inside out while slowly spilling your innards on the floor.
Crom Cruach evokes the anxiety, dread and existential horror of our current moment in history better than virtually any book I’ve read in the last decade, save perhaps The Deluge (a very different novel, but one that also doesn’t have time to play it safe.) It’s a book that I find impossible to explain – it experiments with form, yes, but not in a pretentious way. I wonder if this is how it felt to read Naked Lunch when it was first published. Most importantly, what Crom Cruach does is reclaim apocalypse culture from the incels. It offers a glimpse of a frightening mysticism simultaneously ancient and new. At times I was reminded of Swans’ album The Great Annihilator, one of the most spiritually profound works of art I’ve encountered. I’m not putting Crom Cruach on that level but part of what has always driven me to the weird are works of art that evoke the spiritual entwined with the truly dangerous: the birth of new forms, the dissolving of what we think we understand (because we don’t understand shit.) The words have become threadbare: void, cosmic, multi-dimensional. The concepts have not.
Crom Cruach is a voice from the outside. But it is not alone. Its publisher, Tenebrous Press, and other small presses are dedicated to the outsider voices, the truly dangerous, the truly new. Support them.
The Emperor of Gladness
This confounding book.
It’s pretentious as all get out. Absurdity punctuates the story in such a way that the reader cannot determine if it is intentional or not – is this clever writing or a lack of clarity on the author’s part? I roll my eyes. At least half a dozen times I am ready to toss The Emperor of Gladness across the room, frustrated with its whiplash muddiness, its clumsy then brilliant writing, its mumblecore.
But I never do, because I am in love with every single character in this maddening, soaring book. These characters whose hearts are too big for their circumstances but press on every day in all their delusions that they know are delusions. They do this because they know each day you get up and draw a breath is better than a day you don’t. These characters who love each other because no one else does and that gives them a communal bond that even the brokenness of their lives can’t wipe away. There is so much goddamn heart in this novel, and the more heart, the more there is to break. And yet. And yet.
The cracked sun still rises. A simple touch on the shoulder contains the warmth of a thousand stars. We humans, so tiny. Our dreams, so outsized.
Yes, I almost threw the book a half dozen times, yet there is no other novel I’m more grateful for having read this year. The Emperor of Gladness is the reader of this remarkable book, sitting on a throne of threadbare blankets.
Old Soul
<spoiler alert!> I’m putting this alert up front because it’s impossible to talk about Susan Barker’s Old Soul without discussing the ending. So let me say once more: <spoiler alert!>. Got it? Ok.
I like ambiguity in horror. I don’t like muddiness. In Old Soul we get smears of both. Great portions of the book are given to the back stories of the victims of Eve, the immortal murderer whose dark presence drives the book. These back stories are well-written and compelling. Eve herself is more problematic. Barker wants us to think of Eve as complex and justified in what she does; for this reader she is unsuccessful. Behind Eve is a big baddy with the charming name of The Tyrant. The Tyrant is too abstract to be fearful as the story requires. This makes Eve feel less justified in what she does; we are meant to empathize at least a little bit with her predicament but the linkage never happens. Still, I would argue that the up until the ending the storytelling is strong and interesting enough that the book is a compelling read.
And then there’s the ending. Bluntly, the “heroes” lose the battle and die. Eve walks away. Evil wins. And you are left feeling that nothing in the book ultimately mattered – those in-depth backstories were for naught; the universe is empty and meaningless. A bleak reminder of our fragility or the failure of the author to craft an effective antihero? For this reader, the latter.
The night I finished Old Soul, a terrific windstorm came in. Rain, pine cones and branches pelted the roof all night and the power went out. I’m a light sleeper in the best of times; when a storm like that hits it blows sleep far out of reach, sweeping me instead into a surreal combination of tense wakefulness and shutdown exhaustion, when thoughts trail through the mind in colors never glimpsed otherwise. When dreaming and waking life are both meaningless terms. In this state I found myself turning over every stone of Old Soul, pulling it apart and re-contextualizing it, interrogating it, debating it and finally just feeling it. I came to realize just how visual the book was; Barker is to be commended for painting a fully realized picture without a lot of busy description. In this non-tethered reality I felt close to the story…and all the more frustrated with the ending. It felt wrong for all the time spent with these people to wind up meaning nothing. Yet I cannot help but admire Barker for doing this. It’s not the easy way out and I respect the choice even if I don’t agree or think it successful. Most genre books published by one of the big 5 publishers wouldn’t have the nerve to do it. Kudos to Barker for bucking the trend.
In the end, Old Soul got under my skin and isn’t that the goal? At the same time, I can’t give it an unconditional recommendation. It didn’t play fair, and while life doesn’t play fair either, I don’t really need a reminder in my fiction. Bleak I can handle. Cheating I can’t. Approach at your own risk…
The Lonely Lands
Ramsey Campbell is a legend. Over a sixty-plus year career, he has cast a huge shadow over the horror/weird field (but only occasionally over Innsmouth.) I have deep admiration for the man’s work. He is a foundational influence on my own writing. And yet, I don’t think he’s all that widely read, even by genre fans, and I definitely think he’s underrated. It’s simply a matter of style: his work is not all that approachable. He’s brilliant with language and he wields that language to create a voice that is always strange, a little off, a little (or a lot) uncomfortable—and sometimes obtuse. It’s been said multiple times (first by Stephen King, I believe) that reading Campbell is like tripping on low-watt LSD, where everything is strange and paranoid and you are waiting for reality to collapse, but it never quite does. To this I would add the effect produced is one of queasiness, as if the edges of your brain are being nibbled away by a nebulous force. Understandable, then, why even deep readers in the field may not want to take the journey.
Campbell has written over 40 novels (and countless short stories.) He’s such a unique flavor that I tend to read one novel every 2-3 years and I’ve only read a dozen in total. Of those, I’ve only read two published in the last twenty years, so I thought it was long past time I checked in on his current work. I settled on the 2023 novel The Lonely Lands. The synopsis suggested a study of grief, the prevalent theme of my reading this year. I was curious to see not only how Campbell approached the topic, but whether his characters would forge a connection with me—a rarity in his work, even in the books I admire.
And, well, they didn’t. The characters in The Lonely Lands don’t act or talk like humans, instead they are a distorted exaggeration thereof, especially their dialogue. This is a problem in a book dependent on forging an emotional connection to the reader. It’s hard to feel a character’s grief when all of their world operates with a totally different form of emotional communication, one that the reader can’t perceive beyond its alienness in comparison to our own. At times, I wondered if Campbell was going for satire. I don’t think so, but I couldn’t pick up what he was going for half of the time. Most surprising, though, is how often Campbell tells instead of shows. This is not a problem I’ve encountered in any of his other books; perhaps the subject matter was far enough out of his comfort zone that he had trouble executing?
In the end, the story The Lonely Lands wished to be could not fit into the skin into which it was shoved. Nothing will change my overall admiration for Campbell, but I find myself increasingly wary of his output. Honestly, the last Campbell book that really got under my skin was 2004’s The Overnight. I’m glad he’s still producing at a steady clip, but I have to wonder how much more I will explore…
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was that rarest of creatures when published – a literary novel that received excellent reviews/critical consensus and was a popular success (i.e., it actually sold well.) That was in 1984. All of these years later, does it still stand as an important work of literature?
It’s pretty damn hard for any book to feel relevant after 41 years, so to say that it is no longer relevant is not to denigrate the novel itself. Which is, to be frank, a pretty odd book. It doesn’t really have a plot, following as it does four characters journeying through their adult lives. Roughly a third of the book consists of philosophical musings, during which the nameless narrator frequently addresses the reader directly. We are forever told and never shown anything regarding the characters, who are really nothing more than ciphers. There’s no flesh and blood.
Yet Kundera somehow makes this approach work. It shouldn’t work—it should be unbearably (ha ha) pretentious and unreadable. And while some passages inevitably meander too much for their own good, I found the book surprisingly readable. Even compelling, to a degree. And damn if I can put my finger on why. Though the historical context is interesting (one section of the novel takes place during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the complexities of life under communism are forever in the background), the characters most assuredly are not. Well, except for the dog. Seriously. The dog will steal your heart.
Kundera is a very functional writer – sparkling prose this is not. Yet it works for this subject matter, and maybe that’s the key. It’s a weirdly approachable book. And while there are certainly outdated aspects (the book’s attitude towards and musings on sexuality are so outdated as to be positively musty…and kinda gross) I found myself strangely moved by the end of the novel – even though we are told very early on how it’s going to end.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an enigma. It wound up taking more of my headspace than I would have expected and while I still don’t understand why—or why it managed to be so popular, even back in the day—I can’t deny its effect.
Hangsaman
One of the joys of life is an unexpected used bookstore find. I didn’t even know there was a Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman, a novel I’ve been curious about for decades but never seen in the wild. Jackson is a foundational part of my love of literature. Books just don’t get more transcendent than The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. But aside from those two, the only other Jackson novel I’ve read is The Sundial, courtesy of my local library some years ago. Her early work has never been available in any bookstore I’ve wandered in to, though I’m sure online is a different story. Anyway, one day last summer I was browsing my local independent bookstore, Third Place Books, with no intention of buying anything when lo and behold, there was a used copy of 1951’s Hangsaman on the shelf! The universe had provided.
Enough of the discovery—what about the book? Hangsaman is an interior novel. Our protagonist Natalie is a rough draft for the approach to character Jackson would refine with Eleanor in Haunting of Hill House. It is impossible for the reader to get close to Natalie. This is intentional, I think, but I’m not sure it’s a successful approach as it keeps the story distant. Which is not to say Hangsaman is unreadable, because it sure isn’t. Even if Jackson hadn’t found her mature voice yet, so many of her signature elements are present. The approach never quite coheres but it’s fascinating to watch Jackson try, if that makes sense. You sense a good writer on the verge of becoming a great writer.
Not to read too much into real life, but I could not help but wonder if Hangsaman’s pompous, narcissistic father is in part a skewering of Jackson’s husband, Stanley Hyman. Any reader of Ruth Franklin’s biography of Jackson, A Rather Haunted Life, may well draw the same conclusion, though I don’t recall it being called out in the book. Still, Natalie’s father matched my mental picture of Hyman (not a positive thing.) I was quite surprised at the upbeat ending. I expected the book to go to a much darker place (à la Hill House) and I found myself wondering if this was how Jackson really wanted to conclude the story or if commercial hopes/expectations of the time led her there. Hangsaman didn’t find its audience and that’s not surprising. As wonderfully strange as the novel gets, it lacks the clean prose and confident storytelling of Jackson’s later works. I think it’s a worthwhile, important read for Jackson fans. For the casual reader, it’s a curiosity at best.
Our Wives Under the Sea
Of the common fears—fear of the dark, heights, closets, jury duty notices—the one that wields the most power over me is the fear of drowning. Because our fears are so often also our obsessions, for as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by deep water. I watch shipwreck documentaries over and over and over. I write stories that take place at the ocean’s edge. I lie awake at night and wonder what it would feel like to sink all the way to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
I am also generally delighted to encounter a healthy dose of realism in my fiction. Enter Julia Armfield’s 2022 debut novel, Our Wives Under the Sea, which deals with being stuck at the bottom of the ocean, body transformation (I wouldn’t call it horror in this case, though some would), marriage, grief and distance. A novel that should be right in my wheelhouse. And…hey, it was! This was the first full novel I read in 2025 and it set a high standard.
At its heart, Our Wives Under the Sea is simply a book about two people in a relationship: what we see in our partner, what they see in us, and whether we can truly move forward if all we want to do is hold on to the past. Hardly unique themes, but Armfield gives her characters levels of complexity that ground the reader even when the story enters stranger waters. Armfield is less sure handling the “weird” aspects of her story. They can feel awkwardly bolted on, yet since they are secondary to the tale Armfield is telling, I didn’t find the awkwardness off-putting. If you approach this book as a weird tale first, you are likely to be disappointed. Our Wives Under the Sea is a character study of two people and the stages of their relationship. Oh, and the creepiness that resides in the deepest part of the ocean. What’s not to love?
Short Takes
T. Kingfisher’s A House with Good Bones is the horror equivalent of a cozy mystery. Loved the protagonist, laughed at the wonderful dialogue. There was just one mis-step – the hunky handyman and the protagonist should totally have hooked up…
Sarah Moss’s 2018 novel Ghost Wall is a slim book that does not fall into any clear genre. This odd little tale of seven people living like Iron Age Britons for a week is less a plotted story than an exercise in atmosphere. Thanks to the compelling first-person narrator I was consistently engaged and found the climax moving, if a tad rushed. There is something strange yet powerful about Ghost Wall that has it lingering in my mind beyond what the story offers on its surface…
Brian Evenson is prolific spawner of the horror tale – it seems like he publishes a new collection once a year – and he’s a solid if rarely remarkable writer. Sleep Tight, Good Night suffers from repetitiveness with several of the stories virtually identical in terms of structure, theme and plot but comes out on the positive side of the ledger by tackling the thorny issue of AI from a variety of angles. I’ve read a few weird tales exploring the implications of AI, but this is the first single-author collection driven almost entirely by the subject to cross my path. Evenson offers up some thoughtful observations on identity and what it means to be human, though several of the stories suffer from being too obvious. Worth a spin if you’re interested in the subject matter…
Gabino Iglesias’s The Devil Takes You Home is modern crime fiction pulp with weird overtones. It’s a mixture that works thanks to the strength of the clean, straightforward prose. Given that (deliberately) no one in the book is remotely likeable, the stakes never feel high at any point. That this is only a negative during the tale’s climax is a testament to how evocative the book is overall. I swear I felt like I was sweating in the desert heat and longing for a shower throughout my entire read. The violence, while not unexpected, is at times graphically uncomfortable – this coming from a jaded reader, so be forewarned. Overall, a compulsively readable book but the overall bleakness and cruelty will necessarily limit its audience…
Ice is not really a novel but one long prose piece. Anna Kavan’s 1967 books feels very prescient in 2025, and though some of the particulars are dated, I was surprised at just how modern the book felt. Throw Kafka, Burroughs and Woolf into a blender and you’re close if not quite there. Ice reads like a metaphorical presentation of the author’s tragic life, but to call it only that is to sell it short. It’s a book upon which many interpretations may be successfully drawn and yet it will still remain elusive. Most experimental fiction ages poorly. Ice is an exception…
Wuthering Heights: Not joking, I could not put it down. I was surprised at the level of psychological violence. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. A passionate novel that still has a surprising edge all these years later…
Nat Cassady’s novella Rest Stop gives you enough bugs and splatter in a quick little ditty to potentially require an extra Tums or two, if not actually put you off dinner. The writing and scenes are good, the one problem being a protagonist who is such an unpleasant dumbass you can’t help but feel he deserves what he gets…
I don’t know who saddled Girl in a Creek with its trendily generic title, but they failed in their job. “Girl in a Creek” is the title of a boring mystery/thriller with sketchy AI cover art, not an excellent little horror novel such as this. Wendy N. Wagner’s book is an effective modern-day spin on the “something weird in a forgotten small town and the woods beyond” trope. It doesn’t break new ground and it has a few pacing problems, but I kept turning pages, eager to see how it would unfold. But that title…not only is it generic, but the actual girl in the creek is also just one of multiple storyline concerns. A better title would have been The Strangeness, which is much more encompassing (being the name of the force/entity driving the story) and catchy. Maybe it was already taken…
King of the Hill
One reason 2025 didn’t entirely suck: It was an active year on the Stephen King and Joe Hill fronts.
Let’s start with King’s latest novel, Never Flinch. This is pure crime fiction, no hint of supernatural, featuring King’s protagonist of choice for the last decade, Holly Gibney. While I will never understand King’s fascination with Holly, she’s fine here. Never Flinch is tight, free of the digressions that often crop up in King’s oeuvre (for the record, I frequently love these digressions!) This is a crime story, but not a mystery – we know who the killer is within the first few pages, so it’s all about how the threads are drawn together. King does an outstanding job in particular at increasing tension throughout the book. His best crime novel? I think it might be. An unnecessary subplot about a fire department vs. police department charity softball game muddles up the otherwise tense climatic pages but this is my only real complaint.
King has never been a political writer, per se, but many of his books feature the social politics of the time weaving through the story. Here, however, they aren’t weaving – they are front and center. His anger is palpable and almost shocking (and frankly, for this Constant Reader, cathartic.) But he never preaches. Flinch never winds up feeling like escapist reading – the sounds of our tire fire society screaming bleed out in every line. King is wrestling with the absurdity, the anger, the sadness – all in the guise of a good yarn. Am I reading too much into it? Maybe, but I don’t think so, and that the book’s afterword ends with a list of supporters for a woman’s right to choose who were murdered makes King’s intentions clear. Never Flinch is not only a great read, it’s relevant. How many mass market novels can say that in 2025?
While I don’t normally cover re-reads here, I had a few thoughts upon re-reading Needful Things for the first time since its initial publication. I was struck by how much it mirrors—and distorts—the small town under a microscope approach of ‘Salem’s Lot. Whereas ‘Salem’s Lot is almost intimate (and therefore more disturbing), Needful Things is crash and bash all the way. Though published in 1991, it’s really King’s last 80’s novel. Big (bloated), packed with current pop culture references, King gleefully destroys Castle Rock – and his glee fairly shouts from the page. This approach can be fun, but the supporting characters become, by necessity, grotesque distortions of small-town inhabitants—and by 1991, these types of small towns didn’t really exist anymore, not in this 50’s baby boom way, which to my mind makes King’s approach a valid one. He would never really write about small towns and their inhabitants again. The characters of ‘Salem’s Lot – and even an earlier 80’s book like It – feel lived in, but the characters of Needful Things do not, with one glaring exception: the central protagonist, Alan Pangborne. Alan often seems like the only real human in this story (save maybe for his love interest, Polly Chambers, at least through the first half of the book before she inevitably falls to reduced complexity to raise the stakes of the plot.) And this saves the book, I think. Much of Needful Things, especially from midpoint on, feels more like chess pieces being moved about than an actual story. Pangborne keeps it from fully going off the rails and gives the reader someone to relate to. King had to move on after this, and he would stumble for a while in the 90s before, in this Constant Reader’s opinion, re-centering himself with Bag of Bones. All said, though, I did enjoy rereading Needful Things. Though a near anachronism upon publication and certainly one now, King’s gleeful energy makes it damn near impossible not to get swept up in the bombast of it all. It’s not a novel, it’s a cocaine fever-dream (even if it was, I believe, written after King’s recovery from addiction.)
Friends, we finally have a new Joe Hill book! Nine years after his last novel and six years after his last collection, the prodigal writer has returned with a mammoth (881 pages) tome, King Sorrow. The elation I felt when I purchased my copy is hard to describe. Joe Hill is one of my favorite current authors and in the preceding years I’d often wondered if we’d lost him for good.
So: a lot of anticipation/hope/expectation for a novel to carry, but I’m happy to say King Sorrow bears the load with relative ease. It’s not a perfect book – we’ll get to a few quibbles in a moment – but its ambition is on a level that is currently rarely seen in populist, mainstream fiction. That ambition reminded me of The Deluge, Stephen Markley’s monumental, urgent novel that blew me away last year. (That’s twice I’ve referenced The Deluge. Please read it. It’s an important – and great – book.) The methods of attack and what they achieve are drastically different, but both are novels that attempt to tackle the big subjects of our fragmented, burning world – something that populist fiction is increasingly retreating from.
Initially, I thought King Sorrow was shaping up to be Hill’s take on his father’s It: seven friends encounter cosmic evil at a young age (though Hill’s characters are in college, not grade school) and the book proceeds to follow them through their adult years, portraying the impact this evil has on their lives. In the broadest sense, this outline is true, but whereas It is primarily a novel about childhood – even when the adults are center stage – King Sorrow is a book about adulthood. Love and relationships mix with some of the worst aspects of American society over the last 33 years (the book’s timeline). Throw in allusions to King Arthur, Tolkien and the senior King’s work and you have a book that’s got a lot going on. Yet King Sorrow never drowns in this volatile mix. The prose is clear and straightforward. The story never gets lost in subplots or metaphysical musing. It is a populist book of the highest caliber: I say this with deep admiration. It’s a reminder of what fiction can do without gatekeeping. It’s easily Hill’s finest novel.
That said, I do have one point of caution and one quibble. The point of caution: ever since NOS4A2, Hill has been bouncing off his father’s huge shadow, incorporating small parts of King’s canon into his own work and at times uncannily sounding like his father. Of course a similarity is inevitable, but Hill’s own voice is so strong in his early short work and his first two novels (especially Horns) that it can feel like he’s subsuming his own voice. I think King Sorrow ultimately reads like a Joe Hill and not a Stephen King book, but my friends, it is awfully close sometimes. Hill’s last three novels have been huge books of large-scale storytelling; I hope his next one is a return to something smaller and more intimate – or at least free of references to his father’s works. It’s probably fun for him to do that, but as a reader, it takes me right out of the story. I find myself thinking “I’m reading a book by Stephen King’s son” instead of “I’m reading a Joe Hill book.”
My quibble is relatively small: the character of Colin – one of the seven friends – is too much of a deus ex machina. It’s not a fatal flaw, but particularly in the last third of the book, I found myself rolling my eyes. The other characters are characters; Colin is a plot contrivance that the reader will see coming miles away. And because of that, the final two sections of the novel are a little weaker than they should be. This doesn’t ruin the book by any means; it’s merely a mild disappointment. In the end, King Sorrow is everything great fiction should be, flaws and all. Word is Hill is going to shoot for a novel a year for a while. I eagerly await his next missive.
That wraps it up for this year. As always, thank you for reading. Stay safe out there.