In King’s story of Desperation, traffic and law and order are regulated by Collie Entragian, a giant uniformed madman who considers himself the only law west of the Pecos. God forbid you should be missing a license plate or find yourself with a flat tire.
Billy Summers by Stephen King →
Rather than retiring, as he had been considering, Billy Summers takes one last job. It is too hard to resist, with a half-million-dollar advance and another million and a half on completion. First, he has to be sure the guy he is supposed to kill is the wrong person, which has always been required in his work as a hitman.
The plot and story are meticulously crafted, as we would anticipate. The mob boss who hires Billy Summers asks him to immerse himself in the community before the hit, assuming the role of a writer. This unexpected twist adds a layer of excitement to the narrative, as Billy's writing and his approach to it become a story within the story.
One of the intriguing plot twists is the absence of any supernatural influence in the story. However, about halfway through the book, we encounter some references to paranormal activity within a picture on a wall. Despite this unexpected turn, it does not significantly impact the larger storyline. It's almost like an advertisement for his book, “The Shinning,” as the cabin where the haunted picture hangs is across the valley from where the Overlook hotel had burned, and Billy’s friend tells him “bad stuff happened.”
The crime novel is an assigned thriller with several stories within the story and doesn’t disappoint.
Revival, by Stephen King →
A new minister comes to town, and almost everyone in the tiny Maine town comes to love the new minister, his beautiful wife, and his young son.
Mrs. Jacobs, the minister’s wife, and her child die in a terrible auto accident. The young minister loses faith and turns against God and religion in his sermons leading to the town banishing him from the city.
The former minister spends years as a sideshow con man but then has a new plan and pretends to regain his belief in God and becomes a miracle-working faith healer. Electricity is part of his approach to healing, fueled by his lifelong experiments with electricity.
A former resident, Jamie, of the town he came to before the accident, has grown up and become a heroin addict. Jamie seeks out Jacobs' healing electrical treatment cure to overcome his addiction. Still, after being treated, Jamie experiences strange side effects, including sleepwalking and stabbing himself in the arm with sharp objects. Jamie starts to see Jacob as a fraud and looks into the many others that Jacobs has healed. As it turns out, many of them have experienced similar side effects; some have killed themselves and others.
Jacobs contacts Jamie to tell him that his childhood sweetheart, Astrid, has developed terminal cancer, and he agrees to heal her, but only if Jamie becomes his assistant. Jamie agrees, and Astrid is cured.
Jamie continues experimenting with his particular cure, which he calls "secret electricity.” He plans to heal people using a surge of energy from a lightning rod going into a terminally ill woman named Mary Fay. The healing works, but not in the way Jacobs intends.
The revived Mary Fay becomes a doorway to the afterlife. When things get ugly, they find a dimension where dead humans are enslaved for eternity by insane beings. The plot thickens with plenty of horrors to come.
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End of Watch by Stephen King
End of Watch by Stephen King (Bill Hodges Trilogy Book 3)
