Blog Wrap-Up

This has been my first time blogging. I wasn’t sure how I was going to like writing to a public audience but I think it’s been a good experience. Mostly my posts have been reviews about the books I’ve also been reading for class. As I know for sure that I’m going to keep reading, it’s likely that I’ll do a review on a book or two every now and again since I know that I have blogging as a resource to talk about them. One thing I found that was interesting about my experience blogging is that I’ve been getting a lot of views from people all over the world. I wasn’t even planning on trying to get any subscribers to my blog, but through my class assignments somehow I’ve picked up a few. It’s been an interesting experience having strangers read my works and I think it’s probably a good way, if I wanted to focus more on blogging in the future for advertising my fiction writing, to  get noticed. I’m trying to work on a few different stories right now but haven’t made a whole lot of progress other than what I’ve submitted for my class. I hope as it comes to an end that I’ll continue with my writing and try to make it a habit.

For future blog posts I’ll probably be reviewing more works of Stephen King, and of George R.R. Martin. I also think In the future if I do more reviews that I’ll try to analyze the review books more in depth. Because these reviews were for class I found that many times I wrote just enough to cover the word count or the required subject matter, this post included. If I do more reviews on my own, I think that I’ll take the reviews more seriously. Thanks to anyone who has been reading my posts or will read them in the future!

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Review of “The Tommyknockers,” by Stephen King

For this review I read the book “The Tommyknockers,” by Stephen King. The book is 558 pages long.

I chose to

read this book because of my class’s previous assignment to read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Maybe this was a clever marketing ploy by King: make a book on writing causing everyone who read it to want to read your other books to see your actual writing style and see if you stuck to your own advice. It sure had that effect on me. But in seriousness, this is exactly why I wanted to read The Tommyknockers. That and the fact that I thought I could learn a few more things by reading another work of his. In addition to this book, I also picked up another book of his, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, which I have been reading as well.

As apparently

many of his novels do, this story takes place in rural Maine. We follow a woman named Anderson who, besides the company of her dog Peter, lives by herself. One day, while walking in the woods near her house, she literally stumbles over a piece of metal sticking out of the earth and stops to examine it.

The metal was dull grey- not the bright color of tin or iron at all. And it was thicker than a can, maybe  a quarter-inch at its top. Anderson placed the pad of her right index finder of this edge and felt a momentary odd tingling, like a vibration.

I liked

the depth of the characters in this book. The two main characters, Anderson and Gardner have a complicated past which comes up again as they are brought back together seemingly by the force of The Tommyknockers. Gardner is an alcoholic at the end of his rope who comes close to killing himself, and Anderson is a writer living by herself who dropped out of college right before she was to graduate. Because of the struggles of Gardner, through his alcoholism, and Anderson, because of the effects of the Tommyknockers on her mental and physical well-being, and the way that the characters responded to these struggles, I saw them as believable characters.

The Sci-Fi elements which King uses in this book are also believable and really interesting. Fairly on in the book Anderson decides that the piece of metal she tripped over in the woods must be part of an alien space craft. Later on, once she has become fully under the sway of the Tommyknockers, the devices which she creates for herself are believable in the sense that these are devices which she needs, like fixing her water heater and providing her home with a free source of power.

The world building of this story is also very believable and interesting. King basically created the entire town of Haven and at one point he spends a whole section of the book providing short stories of people who currently live there or have lived there in the past. We see almost every aspect of the town play out from where the town recieves its power from to the vet where Anderson takes her dog.

The only section

that was hard for me to read was some of the information on Gardner’s introduction. His backstory and his reason that lead to him hitting rock-bottom, as they say, were a bit dull of a read to be honest.

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