“Needful Things,” by Stephen King

FM's rating:

1.      Premise 9

2.      Prose 10

3.      Plot 10

4.      Characters 10

5.      Overall 10

Comments (optional - but try to keep it under 3000 words!)

This one’s a real treat.  It takes its time and that’s okay.  A 500-page novel by a lesser writer usually seems too long, gets tedious.  A 600-page novel by Mr. King is often just right.  This is a great example of that, with passages that stretch out for pages but manage to keep the reader enthralled for all that time.  Reading King is rarely hard work, more like eating chocolate than chewing a steak.  Fluff?  Many would say so.  But he makes the fluff seem like the most interesting thing in the world at the moment you’re reading it.  If it’s fluff, it’s brilliant fluff!  In the meantime, everything we suspected we knew about human nature is confirmed, the good with the bad.  We feel we know these characters, they seem so real.  The climax, as spectacular as it is, doesn’t completely satisfy intellectually, but other than that, there are no real flaws in this work.  Oh, one could always point to King’s rather crude prose, but he has developed that crudeness of prose to such a fine art that it should probably be seen as a trademark.  I have to admit that I was put off by the title for years, and that even hearing a little of what the premise was left me shrugging.  I should have known better!