King For A Day

It's a nice day outside, but with my head still feeling like a bowling ball, I'm not in the mood to trudge around looking for pretty pictures. Instead, it's an afternoon by a sunny window with my Christmas present.

I have a somewhat chequered relationship with Mr Stephen King - as, I suspect, do most of his casual readership. Even the man himself has compared his work to fast food: there's nothing really good in it for you, but every so often, you get a craving for it nonetheless. For every excellent piece of writing he's produced that examines the self-destructive nature of humanity, there's two or three where ideas were clearly thin on the ground, and it turns out that the forces of darkness were unleashed by an evil pigeon, or a demonically-possessed scooter.

So far, this is looking like one of the better efforts. Halfway between Back To The Future and Goodnight Sweetheart, with a hefty dose of JFK, it does have me hooked. And at a mere 730 pages of hardback, it's actually one of his more concise tales, too.