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?