Then I stopped for a few years and picked it back up again in grad school. I only read three books at the time. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which I loved; Different Seasons, which I used for a grad school comparative analysis paper; and Bag of Bones, which I loved through the first two acts but hated in the home stretch. I blame the end of Bones for making me not read anything else of his for a while.

Then I picked back up about four years by reading It. Took me a year but I finished the book and enjoyed it. Then I went through a couple of his new ones last year, Later

and Billy Summers

both of which I loved.

Now I’m reading his latest, Fairy Tale, and although I’m only four chapters in, I love the writing style.

It’s thoroughly descriptive without becoming nauseatingly overwrought. The characters are well defined and always feel real, like they could seriously be my neighbors and coworkers. The stories are interesting and keep me engaged.

It makes me want to continue this tear and see what else I can do with his back catalog. But I may keep going backwards chronologically by release date because my theory is that I’ve come to really appreciate his current writing style which I feel is more controlled and not as crazy as it was early in his true horror era. The stories now can be dark but without being, oh say, undead killer clown psychotic. Yanno?