I’ve told you all before why I like to read Stephen King. Not because of his stories. Most of his stories are pretty unremarkable in and of themselves. I think I might have said before that his stories have all been told before, but that’s not quite accurate either. I can’t think of anyone who’s ever written a story about a car that came alive and ate people. His storylines are pretty original. And some of them are even pretty interesting. But most of them are pretty shrugworthy.

No, I read his books because of his ability to tell the story. And you best believe if I were sitting around a campfire with buddies telling scary stories, I would want him on my left. Welcome, SpaceBrewers, to the first SpaceBrew Review of 2011. It has been a while since I did a book review, so you might want to pop over to my review system page and freshen up on the categories I use to judge.

I just finished Stephen King’s From A Buick 8 last night. I had put it down for a few weeks – not because I wanted to – and picked it back up the other day knowing I would have an entire weekend of waiting room reading. When you have three kids, your schedule doesn’t always allow for leisurely reading.

Anyway, It was not a bad read. In fact, when I was able to pick it back up again, I was filled with immediate excitement, and could hardly put it back down. I couldn’t wait to delve back in and finish it. This book is about a State Police troop that finds an abandoned vehicle, puts it in their impound, and then weird stuff starts happening. It isn’t Christine part two either. It’s totally different. The storyline is obviously a lot more involved than that, but I don’t want to ruin anything for you.

I found his descriptions of the events and objects to be right on target. I really saw what he was saying. King is usually that way anyway. But when he’s describing something you’ve never seen (and never will see), he needs to get it right. He did a damn fine job, and the chill factor was set on high. The characters were just a trifle hard to follow, but that was because there were so many of them. It’s not really that important to keep up with who’s who as long as you remember the top three main ones. The rest are ancillary, even though they tell a lot of the story. They were all believable and appropriately written though.

Of course his command of the language itself is almost completely flawless, and thus he never kicks you out of the story with a jab to the gut by screwing up a sentence royally. That’s always comforting for me when I read King. I can read his work and know that I’ll get lost in the story, and the only thing that will pull me out of it is something outside of the book.

The end was a Stephen King trademark ending – not the strongest I’ve ever read, but also not as bad as The Stand. You should all know by now though, that no matter how much you enjoy reading Stephen King, you’ll never just be clicking your heels over the ending. They’re mediocre at best. This one wasn’t bad, like I said, it just felt to me like he should have done a little more exploring when the time came to wrap it up. Overall though, it seemed like a more realistic ending than most of his books present, so I’d say we came away with a pretty good solid ending.

So let’s break this down. He tells the story very well, but I have to take off a little for an ending that could have been a little better. So we’ll do a 3.5 on the storytelling here. Storyline gets a 3.5 because I actually quite liked the idea. It was strange and original enough that I would actually seek out the story. Then writing, of course, he gets a 5, as always. He’s brilliant. So here’s the final:

Writing:
Storyline:
Storytelling:
Overall:

When all is said and done, if you average out the three categories, that would give you 4 stars for the overall score. However, on this particular book I don’t feel like it should be quite that high just because of his writing skill. So I will apply my judge’s liberty here and take off a half-star for good measure and balancing. We’ll end up with 3.5, which is about where I feel like it belongs. On a ten-point scale, that’s a 7, or 70 percent. That’s about fair.

So the bottom line is if you see it sitting on the bargain bin at your local Half Price, you might grab it and give it a go. It was a pretty good enjoyable read. If you’re looking for something to knock your damn socks off and give you nightmares, you might rather go pick up Salem’s Lot or The Shining.