Category: Book review

The Long Walk

So I haven’t done one of these in awhile. Today I’m doing a double review much like i did with other King adaptations such as Pet Sematary , Misery , Cujo , Carrie and The Shining in the past. The Long Walk, is of course by Stephen King during his famous/ infamous Bachman era. It was the first book he ever wrote, but didn’t publish until much later in his career.

The premise is simple but intense: 100 young men (in the book) compete in the Long Walk each year for a huge cash prize as well as a special wish granted by the Major, a tyrannical figure who oversees the walk and possibly America’s dystopian regime. Walking is the name of the game. Walk. No stops, no sleep, no exceptions until the last man stands. Death awaits those that buckle under exhaustion and strain via the military’s cruel hand.

So let me talk about the book first. Honestly, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. King masterfully builds tension and dread throughout while rarely falling into the monotonous pitfalls you’d expect. I was invested with most of the characters, especially Pete McVries who becames a friend to Ray Garatty, the story’s overall main character. I’m no stranger to King’s writing, and I can say it was kinda cool getting a glimpse of him in his earliest years before hitting legendary status and mastering the craft. Thankfully, it’s a quick read at 310 pages roughly, just starting to wear out its welcome once it finally ends. I do have to say I never got invested in Ray much as a main character and even started finding him annoying after a bit when I should’ve found sympathy for him. His whole motivation for competing in the walk is flimsy compared to many of the other walkers. My other biggest complaint is the end: it feels abrupt as hell. There’s no satisfying conclusion to some characters I really cared about. No real climax. No catharsis really. Just ends. I get the choice, the futility and hopelessness of it all but I was left feeling let down instead of chilled. In the end, The Long Walk is a solid book. Not great but a good read, especially if you’re new to King and are weary of the sheer size of many of his popular books. I’d recommend checking it out.

The movie has the same basic premise so I won’t recap but I will say their are A lot of small changes I loved as well as fixing 2 of the biggest problems I had with the book. Ray has a new, more relatable motivation and a character arc that hit me like a brick at the end. The ending, by the way, is much different and so much more fulfilling. The actors do an incredible job of carrying the movie. David Jonsson and Mark Hamil especially steal the show but Jonsson comes out on top and is becoming one of my favorite modern day actors. The movie cuts the number of walkers in half which was wise, giving characters more time to flush out. The movie, like the book, is brutal and palpable- as someone who spent nearly a decade pushing carts for the real life Umbrella Corp, this movie and book had me relive some scary shit. In the end, I actually enjoyed the movie more the the book. The book was good, the movie is great and I’m willing to say it’s the best adaptation of King I have seen since IT (2017). May the gaming gods bring you glory, and keep walking.

Horror Movie

Horror Movie: an unfinished, unreleased, amateur, experimental horror film shrouded in myth and controversary since the 90’s. After nearly three decades of occult infamy comes the Hollywood reboot. Of the film’s original production, only the film’s villain christened The Thin Kid remains. What happened to this little picture to gain the infamy and intrigue? Is this lost movie cursed or has life imitated art?

So despite the title, this is novel from horror author Paul Tremblay. I loved A Head Full of Ghosts and I recall Savior saying he enjoyed the movie adaption of The Cabin At The End of the World ( Knock at the Cabin). Horror Movie is a odd novel. It’s well written, bouncing between different time periods. I wasn’t hugely invested, believing I had the story mapped out, but I was pleasantly surprised by the end. I like Tremblay’s approach to horror, adding depth and real life trauma to what would be bland horror scenarios.

For me personally, the book stumbles a few times. I felt like the pacing snags a few times in spots because certain parts feel repetitive. Think Resident Evil 6 when you played part you already did, just through a slightly different perspective. Like for example, there’s a part where the Thin Kid is asked in present day how he pulled off a crazy ass jump. He explains it. Then we go to the past when it was filmed and he relives it; I feel like it didn’t add much. This happens a few times. The characters are fine but I never got attached to any of them, therefore I wasn’t invested in their ill fates.

In the end, Horror Movie is a quick, solid read. I would actually like to see a film adaptation; honestly I think it might be better in that regard. The book isn’t amazing, but well worth a read if you like found footage horror. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

Dungeon Crawler Carl

The Apocalypse is here and it’s being televised. Carl just broke up with his girlfriend Beatrice while she was on vacation. Bummed, still babysitting her apartment and her fluffy show cat, Princess Donut, Carl is in a bad spot. When Donut attempts to runaway in the middle of the night, Carl runs into the night in just his jacket and boxers. All hell breaks loose. Millions dead instantly, leaving the baffled survivors with an announcement: they’re now contestants in a intergalactic game show. Thrown into the Dungeon, now dubbed Crawlers, the survivors most traverse hellscapses full of monsters, looting for gear, and facing bosses before the level collapses. 18 floors, each harder than the rest. And Carl’s only companion is Princess Donut…

The hype around this book was pretty nuts. Every author tuber I follow has this book somewhere on their bookshelves, I’ve seen it posted all over Instagram and Tiktok, and recently it was greenlit for a series on Peacock. I went inn totally blind, weary of literary Blockbusters. This is one of the rare times I think it was warranted.

Dungeon Crawler Carl is a really fun book with great characters, humor, heart, lore and some really cool action. As a gamer, I enjoyed the gaming tropes and found the setup really relatable. Carl and Doughout are great characters that play well off each other, though Doughnut does steal the show more than not. Matt Dinnaman’s writing is down to earth and easygoing, making for a smooth read. My only real complaint is I feel like the book doesn’t come to a real climax. It just ends. No main antagonist per say. There’s alot of threads to be followed up on and their are plenty more books so I’m not too mad. In the end, I loved this book and I highly recommend checking on it. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Playground: Child of Divorce

I hope everyone had a fun, safe, happy New Year. I took another trip to The Playground for mine. Child of Divorce is the disturbing prequel to Aron Beauregard’s splatterpunk hit I didn’t know I want or needed.

The year is 1993 and Geraldine Borden’s macabre magnum opus is under construction. But after a heated swing with young Matthew Cookson went awry, Geraldine and her compatriot, Fuchs, see there’s a road ahead. In the meantime, she ordered Fuchs to build a separate structure, a prototype, ordering her broken adapted son Rock, and Fuchs to abduct a unlucky set of children. Confused, hunted by a nightmare with little explanation, who will survive the first Playground, and what will be be left of them?

Prequels are normally cursed to be inferior to the originals. Sometimes forced, sometimes bloated by needless explanations, sometimes they are decent stories twisted and mangled to fit a mold. Child of Divorce actually avoids all these pitfalls. The book improves immensely from the first. My biggest complaint from the first, the structuring, has been smoothed out, flowing much more naturally. The children themselves are flushed out a lot more and written more three dimensionally; I was much more invested in these kids and their story arcs, feeling truly saddened and impacted when they met a horrible fate. I loved the set up. Mildred, who hunts the children and keeps them moving, truly freaked me out and I tip my hat to Beauregard for making a stalker enemy that is truly nightmare fuel. The book stands really good as a standalone, only nodding to the first a few times. It is a quick read that fits perfectly, not being too short or long. The only downside I can think of was some of the games didn’t resonate with me as much and the dodgeball room utterly confused the hell out of me towards the end. In the end, I loved this book. Hell, it’s one of my favorite prequels. Can I recommend it? Yes, but do your research because there is a massive set of triggers in this book- if the cover upsets you, this book isn’t for you, and like last time, it is a scene from the book and there are disturbing pictures inside. Personally, I loved it, and I think it was captivating, grim, creepy as hell horror story I’d recommend, especially if you loved the first. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Flies Inside

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and Yippie ki ay motherfuckers one and all! I bet this ain’t what you pictured a Savior gaming Christmas special, but here it is. On a day of love, family, and glad tidings, I wanted to talk about our own Torsten’s book, which debuted back in 2021, and in many ways, is the opposite of everything I just mentioned. So let’s look at The Flies Inside.

Charles Porter’s world has been shattered when his love, Remy Wade, commits suicide. Charles had never seen so many flies in his life. Riddled with guilt and longing, Charles descends into madness, unable to leave his shabby apartment for fear of the Vultures outside, leaving his only company to be the unending hordes of flies that promise him the impossible. But is Charles a victim or simply an evil getting his just desserts?

So Flies is Torsten’s debut as an author, and to his credit, he does do some things incredibly well. The book starts with a hard-hitting opening. The body horror is really damn gross and unnerving at times, and I genuinely wanted to know what the hell was really going on. He said he was inspired by Resident Evil 7 and The Shining movie; I can believe it. As for flaws, well, most of it is in the design of the actual book. There are no page numbers. The formatting is cramped, and the printing is small, so it’s physically hard to read. You can also see where the interior needed more work, as when it was printed, more care needed to be taken. The book is short, at roughly 160 pages. I’m torn on the length; I can see it being better if it were a little bit longer and drew out the relationship a bit more, and developed the pretty vanilla detective investigating Remy’s suicide. In the end, it’s a pretty solid first go at writing a book that I recommend checking out. You won’t find many books for $10 with this much heart despite its flaws. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Vaesen: Castle of Gyllencreutz

As some of you may be aware, not long Free League Publishing sent me a PDF of their Starter set for Vaesen. If you want more details about what is in that, you can read about it here. A few weeks after that, I got home from work to a package on my doorstep, and it was the physical version of that same starter set and the core rule book. Now it is an excellent starter set, but I got to wondering, can someone with no experience playing this game, truly get a group together and play this game? So I gathered the women in my life together, a case of our prefered alchol, and got started.

Beautiful cover art for the core rule book. I didn’t use this for my experiment

The first thing I did was have everyone blindly choose one of the 5 playable characters that the set came with. My daughter decided to play as a rugged Soldier named Fronz who couldn’t read. I don’t know why she decided he couldn’t read, but I just went with it. The other ladies chose the 2 ladies in the group; they have names, but admittedly, that isn’t important. By not important, I mean I forgot their names.

The starter set we used

Now, the Castle of Gyllemcreutz story that comes with the set is a great starting point that introduces you to the basics of the game. I don’t want to get too in-depth with what is involved with this story because it is easy to give too much away. Much of the story involves investigating a large castle to find clues on how to solve the mystery involving ghostly lights and missing people.

Dice rolls are all based on rolling a D6; players need to roll a certain number of 6’s to succeed. How many completely depends on how difficult the task is. There is also very little combat in this module, but the person running it could easily change that if they chose to. Nothing is stopping them, and all the information needed to do it is included.

But how did my players do? Well, they never were confused on how to play; they made their way through the castle with very little coaching besides trying to get them to stop goofing off, and the big finale of the whole thing was figured out before we figured out how to finish off a case of alcohol in 2 hours between the 4 of us.

I would absolutely say this starter kit provides everything you need to get you started playing Vaesen with limited or no experience. Best wishes, and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Salem’s Lot (2024)

You know, this is one of those damn movies I never thought would see the light of day (hehe lame vampire pun). It was announced, delayed, then disappeared for a few years before getting dumped on HBO Max like a dead carcass at the slaughterhouse. Years ago I reviewed the novel for Salem’s Lot and since then I’ve read it at least twice and I can say it is a damn good book and a pretty solid vampire tale. While I never saw either mini-series, the trailer for 2024 was enough to make Savior and I at least excited for a flaming dumpster fire. Did we get it?

Sadly no. Salem’s Lot 2024 is not a garbage fire. That’s not to say it’s particularly great or even good. The cast gives decent performances given a pretty crammed script. Much of the soul, the suspense, and characters of the book are crushed, compacted, and repackaged into a forgettable vampire romp. It’s the kind you can forget the same day you watch it which honestly is a shame given how good the book was. The vampires are more like zombies. Barlow isn’t a nightmarish ghoul like in the 79 mini-series but a parody of that memorable design. There’s not even as much gore or hilarious jumpscares as I thought there’d be in the trailer. In the end, read the book or seek out another vamp movie because good or bad, you’ll remember it more than this thing that should’ve stayed in the development grave. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Fisherman

Grief is a terrible thing everyone needs to overcome in their lives. For widower, Abe, fishing is his great release. After losing his wife, fishing helped him get his life back on track. When his coworker, Dan, goes through an unimaginable tragedy, Abe extends a hand of friendship and offers to fish with him. While a quiet friendship blooms between the widowed men, Abe can’t help but see Dan drowning in despair…until they stop for breakfast on a rainy morning, going towards a spot Abe never heard of that Dan seems all too eager to fish at. Almost obsessively so. During this breakfast, they are treated to a folktale of the river, dark magic, the impossible, and Der Fischer who may have opened the gates between life and death. Desperately the men are on a course that might not just cost them their lives, but also their souls as Dan is willing to sacrifice it all for what he lost? Will Abe make the same choice?

So immediately when reading this I thought of a more Lovecraftian take on Pet Sematary . In many ways, I can see it but Langan weaves a pretty solid story telling the folktale of Der Fischer in between the main story. His writing story is very easy to get into and flowed very smoothly to me. Some will get put off by the story within a story aspect of the novel but he neatly pulls it off and neither story feels overstayed. I like his depictions of Dan’s rising mania and Abe’s internal battle against the abominations they face. I found myself wanting to know more about what Der Fischer unleashed and got to see more horrors from the other world. In the end, if you liked Pet Sematary and wished there was Lovecraft in it or wanted to get into cosmic horror but wanted something more modern, the Fisherman is a quick, well-written read I’d recommend. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

Mary: An Awakening of Terror

Mary is a nobody in every sense of the word. Banking on the dreaded 5-0 and wading into menopause, alone in the world except for her “loved ones” (tiny little porcelain figurines she talks to, her life turns upside down once she loses her job. A job that barely pays her enough to get by as is. A sliver lining comes when her loathsome, dying aunt Nadine calls begging for help. After pissing off Mary’s cousin, Nadine is alone and unable to care for herself. Mary is soon left to journey from New York to the eerie desert town where she grew up. Returning home resurfaces not only her repressed hatred for her crass, despicable aunt by the layers of trauma she spent her life hiding as well as what might be the secrets of the town itself? With bodies piling up, visions playing Mary, and an obsession with a hospital that had been converted from an infamous serial killer’s home, the question becomes who and what is Mary?

So I read this book for my book club, going in completely fresh. I knew nothing about the book or author and was even kind of surprised it came out in 2022. As someone who sucks at socializing, suffers from a host of mental health issues, and is just awkward as hell, I felt for Mary. I found her to almost be an updated Carrie, someone shy, frumpy and pathetically beaten down who just wanted to matter. This story takes a lot of crazy ass turns from being a ghost story, to a psychological thriller, to some bizarre Midsommar levels of WTF. The book deserves to be experienced because it is fun as hell trying to figure out where its going. However fun that particular aspect is, it causes some issues towards the end. A character I hated got a half-assed redemption and the ultimate conclusion, while being fun and over-the-top gory, didn’t really satisfy me. The ending couple of chapters felt unnecessarily open-ended, but given how weird of a ride this story was, I can’t tell you if a sequel would work.

In the end, I enjoyed this book a lot but I didn’t love it. It’s very well written and really engaging but the ending as well as some plot choices fumble it from being great. Absolutely a good read worth checking out if you want a weirder kind of horror book. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Playground

Hey kids, have you ever heard of splatterpunk? Have you ever watched Willy Wonka and wished there was Saw in it? Well, Aaron Beauregard has you covered. Before I begin, the cover of this book tells you exactly what you’re getting into. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover, fuck that, here’s a good exception to the rule. This book is gnarly so if you have a weak stomach and the idea of children dying triggers you at all as well as some really, really WTF sexual stuff involving poop at one point, this book is absolutely not for you.

3 low-income families receive the chance of a lifetime from the reclusive billionaire and philanthropist, Geraldine Borden. She and her adopted son, Rock, have invited the families with their total 8 children to come and test some new state-of-the-art playground equipment in exchange for $3,000 per family. Not a bad deal, right? The parents even get to relax in their own private theater and monitor their children at play…until things go violently wrong. Ambushed by ravenous dogs, the children are chased through a razor blade-laced chute to a dungeonous series of macabre games where survival is the only reward. The parents, captive in places, are forced to watch there beloved children fight not only the horrific games but also themselves as Geraldine’s twisted games unfold…

Holy shit this book gave me whiplash. Is it a fun read? Hell no! Is it an exciting read I literally couldn’t put down? I really couldn’t. The kids are the superstars of the story and a lot of praise to Beauregard for writing thoughtful, authentic children instead of angelic Hollywood kind of kids. I felt for quite a few of them on their reactions and grisly fates while also cheering when the villain of the eight gets his just deserts. The games are eerie and pretty imaginative with some incredibly disturbing outcomes. I like that Geraldine is in no way a sympathetic or redeemable villain in a modern world of tragic villains. Rock is a really tragic character and his redemption at the end is well-earned. The flaw in the book is the parent sections which do drag the pacing down. The book is organized into 3 POVs: the kids, the parents, and Geraldine. The parents are literally locked in place and most of their sections revolve around reacting to what just happened to their kids. It makes the pacing a bit bumpy, especially around the middle.

So in the end I really enjoyed the book, though all be damned if I didn’t need a hot shower and a hug after. No, there’s no happy ending and yes this book is depressing and horrific but the ending lands and is self-contained which is cool. It’s honestly well worth a read and well written if you can get past the grotestuque subject matter. May the gaming gods bring you glory.