audiobooks

Stephen King's digital story is fairly good. His usual slice of life runs headlong into horror story that mainly revolves around a young man's relationship with his single mother. The characters are great and the dramatic parts of the story work very well and are touching -- mirroring King's relationship with his own mother and her passing. But the horror part is less than satisfying -- a nice little build up that goes nowhere. As the character asks at the end, "what was the point of that?"

My main reason for writing the review is to keep you from the same mistake I did. The e-book is included in written form in the collection Everything's Eventual (as are the audio books LT's Theory of Pets and Blood+Smoke). You can't even print the e-book out to get the nice cover art.

Keep your money. Buy Everything's Eventual. You'll get this nice little story plus 13 others (see my review there) and it will look much nicer on your shelf than this will on your hard drive.

Again, King has impressed me with ability to tell those tales. I found this story to be eerie,which is unusual for me as I read a lot of horror. And as Bram Stoker stated in Dracula,
"Denn die Todten reiten Schnell" (For the dead "travel" fast)

Riding the Bullet was a great book. It was exciting from the beginning to the end. There was never a time where I was bored or when the book was dull. It got right to the action and it was "short but sweet". It was about a man who gets a phone call saying that his mother had a stroke and is in the hopital. Even though he is told it is nothing serious, the man is very worried because his mother is an overweight smoker who is in her mid fifties. The hospital is 100 miles away and his car does not work. He decides to hitch a ride. An old man picks him up. he drives him about halfway there and drops him off near a graveyard. The man begins to walk through the graveyard. As he is doing this, he is also thinking about his mother, and all the things she used to say. One of her favorite sayings was "Fun is fun and done is done". The man looks at a tombstone. It says someone's name, and the date that he died. Underneath of that it said "Fun is fun, and done is done". The man is startled and falls backward. He gets up and then finds a ride with a young man about his age. The man has a button on his shirt that says " I rode The Bullet at Thrill Village." There is something strange about the man. It smells like chemicals in his car, and there is a huge scar going all around his neck. The man soon finds out that the man giving him a ride is dead. The dead man locks the car doors and speeds up. He starts questioning the man. The dead man knows all about the other man and his mother. He knows that she is sick and in the hospital. When the man asks the dead man who he is, the dead man replies, " I am like a messenger, except my job is worse than that of an angel." The dead man tells the other man that he must decide between his mother and him. Whichever one the man chose would live, and the other one would die. The man struggled to think but in the end he said "Take her. Take my mother. Spare me." The dead man reached back and touched the other man's chest. He then pushed him out of the car. When the man woke up he was back in the graveyard. He figured it was just a dream, but then he looked down at his chest and saw a button; the same button that the dead man was wearing. The dead man pinned it on his shirt just before he threw him out of the car. The man is scared and he hitches a ride to the hospital. As he walks in he doesn't know what to think; "Is she alive? Is she dead?" You'll have to read the book to find out how it ends. This was a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes exciting horror books. If you like authors like Stephen King or R.L. Stine then you will love this book.