I finished Tommyknockers last week, and enjoyed it a little, kind of, sort of. I picture Stephen King writing through a haze of alcohol and cocaine, and I don't think I had this impression only because I've heard him say that it was around the time of this book that his family did their intervention. Also alcohol is a big thing in the book, but more than that, the story is unfocused and goes off into boring digressions a few times. It's less sharp than the best of Stephen King but fairly typical of King's weak mid-period.
But, I continued my Stephen King spree by starting Bag of Bones (audiobook version) this week. This is a more recent book of King's, post-recovery, and it's much sharper. So far the "horror" elements are very subdued, and the writing is pretty effective, straightforward and involving.
I'm also reading A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice, Anne Rice's son. This is a book I bought when it came out and never got around to reading it. The supernatural elements here are subdued compared to his mother's work, and it's a bit more of a high school drama, following four friends dealing with teen angst kind of stuff, but it's actually better than that description makes it sound.
I've also been reading a varied scattering of short fiction lately, such as Todd Chiang, Kelly Link, Nancy Kress, Benjamin Rosenbaum, and David Foster Wallace. I started writing fiction again myself recently and so I've been inspired to sniff around a lot more short stories recently, different flavors from most of the short fiction I used to read (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Carver, obvious literary snooty stuff) when I was writing before.
