Syllabus #256

 The Maybe the Cujo Ate Your Baby edition.  

Not Cujo

I accidentally skipped last week.  I can't blame it on the alcohol.  I can't blame senility, or an RFK Jr. brain worm.  I just procrastinated until I completely forgot.  Did you miss me?  Mom, don't answer that.  

Truthfully, I haven't been Very Online this summer, because it's been too nice out and I'd rather go on my little walks and sit outside and read my little books, or come inside and pet my little cats.  Or my big dog.  Which brings me to the title of this week's edition.  I finally read Cujo and now I feel bad for all the times I've ever called Charlie that name.  Cujo wasn't a bad doggie!  He didn't exactly ask that rabid bat to bite him on the nose.  He didn't want to go on that killing spree.  He just had to.  

Like Cujo, Charlie is a Very Good Boy.  Unlike Cujo, Charlie is fully vaccinated and will never tear out my throat in a murderous rage over which he has no control.  Also, compared to 200 pound Cujo, our Charlie is just a little guy.

At its core, Cujo was just a helpful PSA about the importance of making sure your dog gets a rabies shot.  And not leaving your kid in a hot car.  Thanks, Steve!

Before Cujo, I finished the Four Past Midnight story collection, then moved on to Stephen King's new story collection, You Like It Darker.  There was a story in there about the dad from Cujo, 30-some odd years in the future.  It wasn't exactly a spoiler to read it before the original story, and like, you can't really complain about spoilers from a book that came out over 40 years ago.  But it was somewhat strange that this revisitation of the Vic Trenton character involved more supernatural phenomena, where the original story had just the barest hint of the supernatural, and really just relied on suspense, psychological horror, and gore.  And even then, minor supernatural blip could be arguably dismissed as happening all in Vic's mind.

Now I'm reading Lucy Foley's The Hunting Party.  I just started it, but her books are always fast paced and seem like they're going to be predictable until she delivers a twist that I never see coming.  

I am going to tentatively declare this the Summer of Steve, though, because I'm queueing up Misery and Pet Sematary to read very soon.  

Syllabus #255

 

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Well summer vacation was fun for all the 37 seconds that it seemed to last.  Now this glutton for punishment is back to working summer school.  Getting up at 5 AM is NBD during the regular school year, but it feels like a special form of punishment to do it during the summer.  The fact that it's only 3 days a week seems like it would be a mercy, but instead my brain and body apparently have to pack a week's worth of indignity into that truncated time period.

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Nothing to see here, move along.

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Analog Reading:

Finished The Library Policeman, the third story in Stephen King's Four Past Midnight collection.  Man was that freaking weird.  I think out of all the Stephen King books I've read so far, this one has to be the most disturbing.  Partly because the subject hits close to home, and I don't ever want a kid to develop a phobia of the library over a lost or overdue book!  But also, sources of horror and evil in this story were extra gross and brutal in one case, and extra surreal in the other.  It was almost like if Salvador Dali and Heironymus Bosch had a baby and that baby became the text describing what this librarian becomes and what she does to her victims.  Also, none of this is a complaint.  It was gripping!  It was just like, wow, Steve, cocaine must be a hell of a drug.  Actually I think he was probably sober by the time he wrote this story.

Now I'm about halfway through the final story in Four Past Midnight, The Sun Dog.  So far, it's about a kid who gets a haunted Polaroid camera for his 15th birthday.  That sounds like the premise of a Goosebumps book, so it's naturally going to get darker and more twisted, I'm sure.  Also, sidenote, I was all over Goosebumps and Fear Street as a kid, and R.L. Stine is basically the Stephen King of middle-grade and YA fiction, so why did it take me well into my 30s to get into Stephen King?