Welcome to my message board.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
New member registration has been disabled due to heavy spammer activity. If you'd like to join the board, please email me at MaxDevore at hotmail dot com.
Comments
Not a very good review.
John
The two Steves will keep me busy for awhile.
King sure has a way with rats! ;D
Big Driver was excellent. Loved it. Read it in 2 sittings.
Anyone else feel the same?
That said, really enjoyed what there was of the story.
John
Great set of stories by King. Still humming on all cylinders with this collection.
Will any of them make the journey to cinema? Since it is King, likely so. None of them strike me as being unique enough to become a stand alone movie.
Superior Achievement in a COLLECTION
OCCULTATION by Laird Barron (Night Shade Books)
BLOOD AND GRISTLE by Michael Louis Calvillo (Bad Moon Books)
FULL DARK, NO STARS by Stephen King (Simon and Schuster)
THE ONES THAT GOT AWAY by Stephen Graham Jones (Prime Books)
A HOST OF SHADOWS by Harry Shannon (Dark Regions Press)
The winner will be announced in late June.
Ask Chicopee Public Library Director Nancy M. Contois if she has read anything by Stephen King lately, and her response will likely be laughter. That's because much of the action in one of the short stories in King's latest book, "Full Dark, No Stars," takes place in Chicopee.
That might seem a stretch to some, given that Chicopee is not particularly renowned as a haven for the monstrous or the supernatural. With the possible exception perhaps of the King Kielbasa (no known relation to the author).
That eerily ever-expanding edible sausage, which graced the World Kielbasa Festival for 22 years, was last seen weighing in at an astonishing 623 pounds back in 1994.
Contois's laughter, however, is for an even more personal reason. (Mild spoiler to follow). One of the story's nastiest villains is none other than the "head librarian" at the Chicopee Public Library.
"Isn't that a hoot?" Contois said, laughing.
Rest assured that Contois is nothing like her fictional doppelganger, Ramona Norville, described by King as a "jovial woman of about 60 or so," with a "Marine haircut and a take no prisoners handshake."
"She is the salt of the earth, one of the sweetest persons you could ever meet," Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette said of Contois.
"She certainly is evil," Contois said of her alter ego.
In the story, the protagonist, an author named Tess, is invited to speak at the library's book club. Tess, who lives in Connecticut, accepts and drives to Chicopee for the event.
Although her talk goes without a hitch, Tess's trip to Western Massachusetts turns into a nightmare after the evil librarian recommends that she take a shortcut home that will allow her to avoid Interstate 84.
That shortcut, which involves the intersection of the very real Route 47 and the seemingly made-up Stagg Road, leads Tess to an abandoned store. What happens next is not for the squeamish.
"We don't even do that to people who bring their books back late," joked Bissonnette.
It's not the first time that a fictional character has come to trouble in Chicopee. Actor Joe Gannascoli's character on "The Sopranos" got lost in the city during an episode of the hit HBO show back in 2006.
The Republican newspaper makes a brief cameo later in King's piece when Tess goes online to find more about Norville and learns from a news story that her husband, a prominent Chicopee businessman, committed suicide.
Contois said she read the book after several library patrons mentioned the Chicopee connection.
"You have to be a Stephen King fan to get through the bad stuff," she said.
Bissonnette called the Chicopee connection "a curiosity more than anything," and likened it to the time a few years back that Al's Diner in Willimansett was featured in a "Zippy" comic strip.
Contois said she was relieved to see that with the exception of the route that Tess drives from Connecticut to her speaking engagement, just everything else about Chicopee and its library are pure fiction.
"I was relieved that it didn't get too close too home," she said.
King has used Western Massachusetts as a venue for his fiction at least once before. In his 2001 novel, Dreamcatcher, the fate of all mankind hangs in the balance right here at the Quabbin Reservoir when an alien attempts to poison the water supply with deadly spores.
King met with Quabbin officials and got a tour there while gathering material for that book.
It's unlikely, however, that King visited the Chicopee Public Library before writing this particular story, which is titled "Big Driver," Contois said. "I bet my staff would have picked him out in a second."
Why Chicopee? Contois theorizes that King have been simply drawn by the somewhat unusual name. In his afterword, King said he got the inspiration for the setting while driving to an autograph session in Western Massachusetts in 2007.
"There's nothing else you can do but appreciate his sense of humor," Contois said. "He had to have known that there would be a librarian out there that would be connected with this by the chosen location."
Contois said that the library does invite authors to speak, and that she would relish a visit from King.
"He could come, do a book talk and I could give him the wrong directions," she said, laughing. Directions that could very well send King down Route 47 towards Stagg Road.
John