Literary Sins: Cujo Is Not About a Killer Dog

I still feel bitterly guilty that I haven’t read every single book that Stephen King has written, so yes, I’m calling it a sin that I just barely got around to reading Cujo.

I was rather hesitant to pick up Cujo, which is completely out of the norm for me when it comes to devouring Stephen King books. I read Stephen King more easily than I breathe sometimes.

But Cujo is about a dog, and I love dogs.

I was more than a little reluctant to plunk myself down and read hundreds of pages about a killer dog that terrifies a small town, which is what I thought the book was going to be about. I mean, who else thought that? “Cujo” is a name synonymous with “giant killer dog” the same way “Pennywise” is synonymous with “giant killer clown.”

Imagine my utter surprise upon finishing Cujo and realizing that the book is less about a monstrous canine creature and more about the terrifying nature of pure happenstance.

That’s right, folks. Cujo is less about the dog and more about how downright terrifying the notion is that a series of events happening in a precise manner can lead to the worst day of your life.

I haven’t felt this lied to since I finished Moby-Dick.

The big difference this time is that I’m not upset over how many whale facts that I had to suffer through.

I’m delighted.

Low-key horrified after reading the last page, but delighted with the experience overall.

If you have any intention of reading Cujo, DO NOT CONTINUE READING AFTER THIS POINT. I’m about to just deep-dive into spoiler territory. It’s the only way I can gush. But just know that I was impressed with the novel, and I would recommend it not as some kind of monster book, but more as a slice-of-life horror novel.

Cujo starts with two families: the Trentons and the Cambers.

Donna and Vic Trenton have a very young son named Tad. He’s an imaginative little tyke who is terrified of a potential monster in his closet, but a good kid nonetheless. Donna and Vic are going through a rough patch. Donna cheated on Vic with this guy named Steve Kemp. She called things off with Steve, but in a fit or revenge, Steve sent a letter to Vic (a very not-pleasant letter) making him aware of his trysts with Donna. Vic is made miserable by this information, but has to depart to New York for a meeting that could potentially save his business. Donna is left alone at home with Tad and a car that needs to be taken to a mechanic’s.

Joe Camber is a great mechanic, but a bit of a rough husband to his wife, Charity. They and their son, Brett, live in the boonies, out at the end of a country road. Charity does not want her son to end up a deadbeat mechanic at the end of a country road, so after winning the lottery (literally), she negotiates a trip to her sister’s with Joe as a way to introduce Brett to a better side of life. She buys Joe a fancy piece of equipment in exchange for allowing this, leaving Joe behind to take care of the family dog, Cujo.

What then follows is a sequence of events that leads to tragedy.

1. Cujo chases a rabbit into a cave that has some bats and gets nipped on the nose after startling them with his bark. This gives him rabies.
2. Donna’s car breaks down on a grocery shopping trip, so she decides to take it in to a mechanic that Vic recommended the next day, i.e. Joe Camber.
3. Charity and Brett leave to visit her sister, with Brett noticing that Cujo is behaving oddly the morning that they depart.
4. Joe decides to take advantage of Charity and Brett’s absence and plans to go to Atlantic City with his neighbor.
5. His neighbor, in a drunken state, is attacked by a fully rabid Cujo. He is killed.
6. When Joe goes to pick up his neighbor, he too is also killed at the neighbor’s house.
7. Tad does not want to be left alone at the house with a sitter while Donna takes the car to Joe Camber’s. He begs to go with her and she relents.
8. Just as they arrive at Camber’s garage out in the middle of nowhere, the car finally breaks down for good.
9. Cujo attacks them, but they are able to safely retreat into the vehicle. However, they are stuck there, with no one living close by for miles. (The closest neighbor is dead.)
10. Steve Kemp, Donna’s former lover, is so incredibly steamed she broke things off, he decides to confront her at her house. Seeing no one is home, he goes around breaking things and ejaculating on the bed in the strangest fit of rage I’ve ever read.
11. Donna and Tad are stuck in the car for an entire day at this point because no one knows they went there and Vic, her husband, does not think it too odd that they have not called yet. He is also consumed with thoughts about saving his business.
12. Donna hopes to wait for the mailman to come along and then honk for help, but it turns out that Joe called ahead of time to hold his mail for his pending trip to Atlantic City. She and Tad spend another day in the car. (Cujo is being preternaturally watchful of their vehicle and has attacked several times.) It is summer. It is hot. They have no food or water to last them.
13. Vic, finally nervous that his wife hasn’t called him or answered his calls, calls the police to check on their place. The cops think he is just being overly worried, but they change their tune when they get to his place and find it trashed. Vic heads home.
14. After examining the wreckage and the ejaculate, Vic knows for a fact that it was Steve Kemp who did this, and everyone assumes that Steve abducted Donna and Tad. The one thing that is odd is that her car is missing, but given the abundance of evidence that Steve was in the house, he is the prime suspect.
15. Donna tries to make a run for the house to get to the Cambers’ phone, but she is tired, dehydrated, and hungry. Cujo attacks her and is able to wound her leg and stomach before she is able to escape back into the car. Tad starts having seizures. He is having severe heatstroke.
16. The police find Kemp, and he admits to breaking in but swears he had nothing to do with kidnapping Donna or Tad. The police learn from Vic when he arrives that Camber’s garage is a place she might have gone to get the car fixed. A cop is sent there.
17. The cop arrives and sees Donna’s car. Instead of calling this in immediately, he gets out of his car first. He sees them inside, but is attacked and killed by Cujo before he can relay this information to others.
18. The next day, Vic has an epiphany after seeing that his son’s “monster words” (a paper used to protect him from the monster in the closet) are missing from his room. He connects this with the fact that Joe Camber has a really big dog at his place, and hey, maybe that’s where they are after all.
19. Donna makes one last-ditch effort to escape to the house after Tad has another seizure. She actually succeeds in killing Cujo just as Vic pulls up.
20. Vic runs over to help, but by the time he has gotten there, Tad has passed away from heatstroke. Everyone was just too late.

And…well…there you have it. That’s the basic plot to Cujo.

This is Stephen King at his finest, if you ask me. He does excel with B-movie horror and Cthulhu mythos type stuff, but I really feel like he has total mastery over the many wiles of human evil and random chance.

More than Cujo’s brutality, you fear Steve Kemp’s outbursts or Joe Camber’s grim abuse. And you also fear the just insane amount of randomness that led to Tad Trenton’s death.

As I turned every page, my jaw dropped not from shocking scenes but from the sheer suckiness of how one person’s decisions could lead to someone being stuck in a car in the middle of the country in the middle of summer with a rabid St. Bernard patrolling outside.

So many little choices led to Donna and Tad not being found in time.

And that was goddamn terrifying.

More than the poor pooch who got rabies.

I rate Cujo a chilling-book-that-is-less-about-canine-terror-and-more-about-how-random-events-can-just-fuck-you-up.

Literary Sins: The Firestarter to Stephen King’s Flame

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a Literary Sins post. I think the last time I wrote about my experiences reading classic books that I probably should have read ages ago, I was railing against On the Road.

Well, this time, I’ve rectified a Literary Sin that many will probably shake their heads and scoff at. “Firestarter by Stephen King is not a literary classic,” they’ll say, “and therefore it’s not a sin that you had not read it.”

I beg to differ.

As a self-proclaimed Stephen King fan, it is an egregious oversight on my part to have not read one of his earlier works. As a matter of fact, I’m making it a personal mission to read through his entire bibliography, so expect to see a few more Stephen King titles in future Literary Sins posts.

Stephen King’s early pieces are some of my favorites. They capture a grisly kind of horror that has become more nuanced in his more recent novels. Carrie, Salem’s Lot, and Rage cover not only horrific themes and monstrous people, but they do so in a very raw fashion. So while I do appreciate the mastery of King’s later works like Under the Dome and 11/22/63, my inner horror fanatic much prefers the slasher qualities of young King.

However, Firestarter is not a terrifying tale such as you would expect from Stephen King. It tells the story of a young girl named Charlie who possesses the ability to start fires with her mind. Her parents were both subjects of MK Ultra-esque experiments, and their child’s latent gifts are a result of those experiences.

Most of the fear in Firestarter comes from two main sources: the unpredictability of a child having access to such destructive power and the widespread reach an immoral branch of government can have on a person’s life.

Charlie and her father spend most of the novel on the run, and you really feel for the dad as he tries to instruct his daughter about when it is okay and not okay for her to use her powers. And those government agents dog them relentlessly.

As you can probably see, those monstrous horror elements that King usually includes in his stories are missing here, and Firestarter suffered a drop in my esteem as a result.

That’s not to say I disliked it. I adore Stephen King’s writing style more than any other author’s, and that was still apparent in Firestarter. But I was expecting something different from what I got.

Before I dive into the negatives, let me focus on the positives.

As always, King excels at describing a person’s inner thoughts. He could cover a whole page with one person’s ruminations, and I would not be bored. Plus, since Charlie’s father possesses some low-key telepathy powers, that makes King’s style of writing from a person’s mind ten times more exciting.

This is doubly obvious when he writes about men who are just plain evil. There is a character named Rainbird who could accurately be called the villain of the novel, and reading from his perspective always induces a shudder. King takes the time to set up Rainbird’s character and motivations, and that is a large driving force behind the plot.

Now, on to the negatives.

The plot meanders.

That’s perhaps the biggest flaw. (Be wary of spoilers ahead, by the way.)

If you want to know the broad strokes of the plot, it is as follows:

a) Charlie and her dad are on the run.

b) Charlie and her dad hide out on a farm.

c) Charlie and her dad get caught and taken to a government facility.

d) Charlie and her dad try to escape.

While handy flashbacks provide context for how Charlie got her powers and fill space between these plot points, they can’t hide how bare bones the story feels. Though Charlie and her father are the protagonists of the narrative, the people we root for, they are often not given much agency when it comes to charting their own course. Granted, when you’re on the run from a shady government organization, you don’t always have a lot of options. However, there never seems to be a big plan or future that they are heading toward.

When compared to some of King’s other stories, Firestarter falls short of a gripping narrative.

In addition to that, none of the characters are as magnetic as some of King’s other infamous characters. Any Stephen King fan worth their salt can name the most memorable characters from The Stand, but a lot of the characters in Firestarter are forgettable.

In conclusion, I would not say that Firestarter is a must-read, even for Stephen King fans, not like Carrie. However, it’s not an altogether bad book. It’s enjoyable. I’d even rate it above the majority of Dean Koontz’s stuff, i.e. all of it.

I rate Firestarter a flaming-good-read-that-won’t-set-fire-to-your-world-but-can-serve-as-a-warm-outing-into-the-world-of-Stephen-King.

Doctor Sleep Movie Review: The Shining Sequel We All Deserved

My friend Sidney and I have watched a strange collection of movies together. We saw Midsommar, Rambo: Last Blood, and Joker together, and if you’ve seen those three movies, you’ll know that it’s a major up-and-down experience. (The down part being totally Rambo: Last Blood’s fault.)

So when he invited me to see Doctor Sleep this past weekend, I was oh so totally down for it. I’ve learned that whatever movie I watch with Sidney, whether it’s good or terrible, it’ll be a side-splitting blast. Plus, Doctor Sleep had been on my radar since the trailer came out.

See, I’ve read both The Shining and Doctor Sleep, both written by Stephen King. I’ve also seen the Stanley Kubrick film, The Shining. And anyone who is a Stephen King fan knows that The Shining movie is a different beast from the book. There’s this huge debate about which version is better, and I’m honestly in the weird camp that really likes both. I don’t think I have it in me to dislike anything Stephen King writes, and Kubrick’s movie is one of my go-to films for when I’m feeling sick.

So, my first impressions when seeing that they were going to make a film about King’s sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep was confusion. How could they reconcile Kubrick’s vision with King’s? I mean, it’s obvious from the imagery and music in the trailer that it was a sequel to Kubrick’s film. But the story of Doctor Sleep that I knew from having read the book was deeply integrated with the events of King’s The Shining.

So I had no idea how the hell this new film was going to turn out.

Well, as it turned out, Doctor Sleep turned out fucking awesome!

They did it. This movie accomplished the impossible. It gave homage to Kubrick’s film while remaining true to everything about “the Shine” that Stephen King imagined.

Visually, the movie tries to emulate Kubrick’s The Shining where it can. The set decorations, the camera movements, the costumes of returning characters, they all make fans of Kubrick get a tingling in the backs of their heads. Even the music, those iconic horns, drums, and rattles will be reminscent of the film.

But story-wise, it is a child of Stephen King.

All too often, movies fail to capture Stephen King’s kind of magic. I think It comes the closest to embodying his kind of mysticism, but even then, given how every iteration of It falls short towards the end, I’d still say It pales in comparison to Doctor Sleep. Doctor Sleep shows audiences what the Shine is supposed to be like, and it does a fantastic job of it. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s mind-bending.

If you can recall from Kubrick’s Shining, when young Danny Torrance is calling out for help to Dick Hallorann, it’s conveyed to you by a high-pitched ringing, Danny shaking and drooling, and quick cuts to scary images. That was supposed to show how Danny uses his Shine to contact Dick.

Doctor Sleep blows it out of the water in this regard. The way in which characters use the Shine is phenomenally portrayed. It’s the best thing about the movie, honestly.

The one thing that bugs me about the movie is the lack of explanation for where those dang canisters come from. (Total spoiler, I guess, but if you don’t know anything about the movie, you won’t know what I’m talking about until you actually see it. So it’s a safe spoiler?) The canisters that contain the “Steam” look futuristic and high tech, but the True Knot state they’ve been around for ages. So what gives?

Anyways, bottom line, if you’re a Stephen King fan, you absolutely have to watch Doctor Sleep. It gives you those twisting narratives and deep emotions we love so well, and it gives Danny Torrance the ending he deserved.

I rate Doctor Sleep a surprising-delight-for-both-fans-of-the-King-and-Kubrick-classics.

Clowns, Gore, and More: IT Chapter Two Review (Spoiler Free)

Just so you guys know, this whole spoilers free thing I’m trying to do here is just me being very polite. The book and the made-for-TV movie have been out for years. This no-spoilers stuff is basically for people who haven’t taken the time to guzzle up their Stephen King lore.

Anyways.

Clowns make me a tad uncomfortable.

I know a few people who are seriously terrified of clowns, as in they will scream, tremble, run away, all that jazz, if they see one, but I’ve only ever been slightly put off by them.

I’ve seen them too many times as vehicles of horror to appreciate them in real life. At the same time, I don’t live my life flinching at working clowns.

So for me, the latest adaptation of Stephen King’s infamous It is nothing more than a good time for me. I can get properly freaked out by a killer clown without shitting my pants.

IT Chapter Two is by no means the best horror movie in existence. It doesn’t break any boundaries or raise any bars. Its scares are largely predictable (especially if you’ve read the book), its gore is blatantly over the top at times, and the mythos behind Derry’s terror goes largely unexplained.

I still adored it.

IT Chapter Two shines, as did its predecessor, because of the fantastic cast of “Losers” being harassed by Pennywise. They are all incredible actors, from the children to the adults. If you loved the kids in the first movie, you’ll love the adults they grow into. I don’t know who is responsible for picking these actors, but goddamn, they did a great job.

There are three big-name actors in the movie, who obviously do a phenomenal job of picking up where their respective child actors left off. But I’ve got to give special props to the man who plays adult Eddie Kaspbrak. I just looked him up on IMDb. His name is James Ransone. I don’t want to be mean, but I’ve never heard of him before. However, he totally fit the role of adult Eddie to a tee. Spot on.

Pennywise’s personal moments are also extremely enjoyable. Unfortunately, they’re few and far between.

In the first movie, when Pennywise has his iconic sewer moment with Georgie, I was astonished at how well actor Bill Skarsgard played him. I mean, it goes without saying that Pennywise is an evil individual. You know it from the movie trailers, the pop culture references, and in your gut when you see him pop up from inside the drain. But when he speaks in his bubbly voice, you can feel a charisma that lurks underneath, a charm that draws his hapless child victims in.

Just as in the first movie, Pennywise doesn’t always have his time to shine while utilizing the full extent of Skarsgard’s acting ability. There is this one moment that feels similar to Georgie’s moment, and you’ll know it when you see it. (Feel free to take guesses in the comments as to which moment I’m referring to.)

In terms of jump scares, the movie has a regular amount of them, i.e. perhaps too many. However, if you’re on the fence about seeing it, you should know I always knew when to close my eyes before a jump scare. I don’t know if that’s an indication of whether or not this movie won’t be too scary for you, but it definitely was okay for me.

The gore was also cringey, as is expected. However, the fact that a lot of the gory moments relied on CGI and stuff actually helped to alleviate whatever feelings of distaste I might have had.

Any qualms I had with the movie, which were not many, were overshadowed by my love for the source material, my respect for the actors taking on these roles, and my genuine appreciation for the theme of growing up that is ever-present in nearly every Stephen King book. No one boils down childhood hope into palatable, less-corny pulp fiction than he does.

I rate IT Chapter Two a definitely-go-see-if-you-liked-the-first-one-or-if-you-like-Stephen-King-in-general-just-be-prepared-to-cry-a-bit-either-from-laughter-thanks-to-phenomenal-jokes-or-from-genuine-sadness-over-the-film’s-ending.

Top 5 Favorite Stephen King Books

I’m not the only person who loves Stephen King’s writing. His popularity can attest to that. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t write a post about it.

You see, Stephen King holds a special place in my heart. He was the first author that showed me how raw story-telling could be. Prior to reading one of his books, I had mostly stuck to classics. I read things like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Tom Sawyer. They could be romping good adventures, but they were dry reads.

But when I was 11-years old, I picked up my first Stephen King book. It was The Dark Half. I was blown away. (And that’s not even his best book!)

King has a style of writing that worms its way into the heads of his characters. It’s choppy and messy sometimes, but it’s engrossing as heck. You not only feel what they feel, but you find yourself realizing you’ve had the same thoughts on your own (which can be disturbing, depending on which character you’re empathizing with).

Plus, I find the concepts Stephen King comes up with are phenomenal. They are simultaneously the stuff of legends and trashy pulp fiction.

He’s not for everyone. I get that. But if you don’t try him out at least once, you’ll be missing out on one of the best contemporary writers of our age.

Here’s a list of my top 5 favorite Stephen King books!

5. Under the Dome

Perhaps better than he writes fantastical monsters, King knows how to write real monsters, the kind that actually inhabit our world. Bullies with more than a simple sadistic streak, corrupt politicians with lies instead of blood running through their veins, and alcoholic fathers trapped in a body of rage and drink. Under the Dome is not a great read because of the giant invisible sphere the mysteriously encloses a small town. It’s a great read because of what happens after. You get to see what the town devolves into, and the best part is that it happens so slowly. Things just don’t erupt into chaos. Panic sets in after days and weeks go by. It’s a slow build-up, and the true horror lies in how you can actually picture some of your own town’s denizens going crazy in the same way.

4. The Mist

This was more of a novella than a novel, but I included it on this list for one simple reason. It’s the first book that ever really scared me. And by “scared,” I mean it scared me. I don’t know what it was about it exactly. Maybe it’s because I read it in one go, never stopping for a break. Maybe because monsters coming out of an impenetrable mist is particularly horrifying to me. Whatever the reason, with every word I read of The Mist, my heart started to pound harder and harder. I would recommend The Mist easily to first-time King readers because it has a sprinkling of everything that makes King King. It has grotesque creatures, creepy old ladies, random sex between strangers, and an ambiguous ending.

3. Christine

For me, Christine was what The Shining was to other King fans. The best/worst part of The Shining was the father’s fall from Nice Dad to Psychotic Dad. In Christine, the best/worst part was seeing Archie’s fall from Lovable Nerd to Douche-In-The-Making. And I love the perspective changes that occur. I don’t always like it when the narrator abruptly switches to another person, but it really worked for me in Christine. Plus, there was a tiny part of me that rooted for Christine, the evil car that takes over Archie’s life. After all, if you think about it, all she really wanted was to be the one thing in Archie’s life. She even “took care” of some nasty bullies that would not get off Archie’s back.

2. It

Of course It made the list. It’s a classic Stephen King story, complete with childhood nostalgia. I read It in 8th grade. It was a hefty read, but totally worth it. It creeped me out right from the very first chapters. The story of how little Georgie Denbrough lost his arm chilled me to the bone. I almost stopped reading it right there. But thankfully I continued, and the best part of reading It was being able to recommend it to my sister. For the longest time, Alya was a Dean Koontz fan, to which I always scoffed, “Koontz is Stephen King-lite. You want the real thing, go King.” I would only recommend It to people who a) enjoy a long read, b) are already a Stephen King fan, and c) won’t be turned off by a strange-as-fudge adolescent sex scene.

1. The Stand

The Stand is Stephen King’s masterpiece. Not only is its immensity impressive, the scope of the story is daunting. It’s akin to Game of Thrones. It follows the stories of several characters as they each experience the end of the world at the hands of the Captain Trips virus. The book then moves beyond that event and tells you the epic saga of what happens to these characters after the virus has wiped out most of the population. The Stand is huge, and I love it because it was the book that made me want to write. I would recommend this book if you have a love for apocalypse stories, really obvious themes of good and evil, or seeing main characters bite the dust.

A Nod to Creepiness

There is only one person in the world who can properly buy a book for me, and that is my friend Mia Sara Moreno.

(Sorry, Boyfriend and Sister, but you know it to be true.)

I know, technically, anyone can buy me a book.

But I’m talking about someone who can browse a book store and find a book that they think I will like.

It’s one thing for someone to know you’ve been wanting a specific book for a while so they go out and get it for you; it’s another thing entirely for someone to choose a book for you.

You get what I’m saying here? (Book lovers, come on, you know what I’m talking about, right?)

Mia and I know each other intimately when it comes to literature. We know our favorite authors, genres, and styles. For Mia’s birthday this year, I bought her Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology. For my birthday this year, she bought me Nod by Adrian Barnes.

She knew what she was doing when she bought me this book.

Mia knows I love nearly everything Stephen King, and Nod is a definite dalliance with King-ness.

Anyone who reads Nod will fall in love with it if they’re a King enthusiast simply based on the subject matter alone. The entire world, except for a select few individuals, loses the ability to go to sleep. Have you ever heard that factoid about people being able to go 21 days without food, 7 days without water, but only 3 days without sleep before seriously adverse effects begin to show their ugly face? Nod tells a horror story about what would happen to those world if those three days were not met.

Nod will tickle your intellectual side too. Its pages contain more than just sentences; you’re reading poetic prose. (Does that make sense?) When I understood a particularly nuanced metaphor that Barnes used, I felt like I passed some random intelligentsia test. It irritated as well as pleased me, but I enjoyed the reading experience regardless.

Isn’t it funny how often those two emotions coincide?

But don’t think that Nod is just intellectualism run rampant. It is downright creepy. The denizens of Earth lose their minds over lack of sleep, and it sucks for those sane Sleepers left with their minds intact. The Awakened are filled with resentment for the people who can still catch a few Z’s, so they actually hunt them down and slaughter them. (Or they torture them to keep them awake 24/7.)

Plus, Nod shoves in your face how little you can really know a person, which is something that plagues me even when more than half the world isn’t losing their goddamn minds. Have you never wondered whether your girlfriend is secretly disgusted by you? Have you ever been secretly disgusted with her?

There isn’t much to spoil about Nod aside from a few key moments that occur before the ending, which I’ll let you discover for yourself if you want to. The book slumps toward its finale like a relentless zombie. No one is there to save the day or to explain why this freak experience is happening. Society just slowly devolves, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. The end.

But it makes for one hell of a nighttime read.

 

The King and The Koontz

Ah, the good old Stephen King versus Dean Koontz debate.

There’s no debate.

Stephen King is the better writer.

Perhaps I’m biased. (But this is a blog, so sue me for being completely subjective about what I write about. [Please don’t sue me.])

I read Stephen King before I read Dean Koontz. I was in middle school, browsing through the paltry offering of books our library had. During my careful examination of every shelf for something I’d like to read, The Dark Half caught my eye. I picked it up, read the first chapter, and I was completely hooked.

My first Dean Koontz book was From the Corner of His Eye. It was engaging. That’s…about it.

Both King and Koontz come up with great concepts. That was one of the fantastic things about From the Corner of His Eye. In fact, concept-wise, From the Corner of His Eye beats The Dark Half. 

It’s their respective styles of writing that sets King apart from Koontz though.

King has a style that delves, while Koontz’s style just polishes the surface.

I recently finished reading Koontz’s Life Expectancy, and despite the story involving killer clowns, I rarely felt on edge. In fact, the plot and the characters felt all around hunky dory compared to my usual King fare. Life Expectancy read like a romantic comedy (almost). That’s not the only Koontz book I’ve read, so don’t think that’s my only point of reference.

In another Koontz book, Intensity, a spider-eating serial killer relentlessly pursues a young woman after brutally murdering her friend (and her friend’s parents). Even though that sounds plenty terrifying, it never reached the pinnacles of unease that Stephen King has set.

Stephen King could write a book about furniture, and it would probably frighten me more than a Dean Koontz book about a supernatural murderer.

There’s a deep grittiness that layers King’s words. At times, it feels as if he’s writing in a stream-of-consciousness style when he describes what a character is thinking. You get to know their hidden recesses, their flaws. It’s like he has no hesitation about facing the darker sides of humanity, reality, and fantasy.

The reason King is king of horror is because he’s able to craft immersion the way a tree can sprout leaves. Creepiness just spews out of him naturally. (That’s supposed to be a compliment.)

Koontz isn’t bad. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve read a lot of his books as well. And I bet he’s sick and tired of being compared to Stephen King.

But Stephen King grabs me into his novels until I’m truly lost, and no other writer has been able to do that for me half as well as he can.