A while back I decided I would go through the short stories in Skeleton Crew and post a review for each as part of my Short Read Sunday post. I got through a couple and then totally neglected to carry it on. So I decided to revisit it and start reading those stories and reviewing them again. A strange side note, my review for ‘The Reach’ is my most popular post to date, I genuinely think I am doing school kids’ homework for them considering the search terms used to find my review are blatantly essay questions. It’s a nice feeling to think that I might be helping kids with their homework haha
My other reviews from Skeleton Crew so far:
The Reaper’s Image by Stephen King
Author: Stephen King
Anthology: Skeleton Crew
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Skeleton Crew Publication Date: 22/03/2010
My Chose Format: Kindle
My Rating of ‘Here There Be Tygers’: 1 out of 5
Purchase Skeleton Crew: Amazon UK, Amazon US
Review:
Although it is only six pages (according to Goodreads, I can’t confirm as kindle pages differ slightly) they were easily some of the worst six pages I had ever read.
Not a fan of the constant use of brackets or the capitalisation of words to show when a character is angry/shouting. Obviously it was written back in the 1960s (I think), maybe ways of doing things were quite different back then.
King’s character building is evident but the bizarre nature of the story and how un-enjoyable I found it just took away from any positives I may ordinarily have gleamed.
The whole story is an annoying kid going to the bathroom (which he insists on calling the basement. This could be due to some sort of language used at home, but this is in no way mentioned) at school and, when he gets there, he finds a tiger in there. A tiger. Just chilling out under the urinals.
I honestly can’t believe I wasted so many words reviewing this story. I don’t often give out 1 stars on my blog and I never thought Stephen King would get one from me … but there we go.
Swords & Spectres 
Ouch! Well, I guess there’s no reason for me to read this. Thanks for the warning! Interestingly, I’m reading Philip Roth’s short stories published in 1959 and they’re REALLY good!
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To be fair, there are older shorts in this collection that are fantastic. I think King must just have really had an off-day. Most people buy this collection just for The Mist. The rest is just a bonus 😊
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Most popular post he says?? 1000+ views?? 10,000?? Sounds awful, you should be glad it was only 6 pages! 🙂
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Not sure on view count. Will check next time I’m not in a rush. My blog doesn’t get that many views so I doubt it will be in the thousands. But ‘The Reach’ gets views nearly every day. And the search terms are things like ‘descibe the use of grief and loss in The Reach’ and other such GCSE English-style questions 😂
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I doubt many blogs apart from the websites get views in the 1,000’s apart from very rare posts. I read on another blog that the average is 50 – 100 per day.
Nice! I get searches for monster porn on my blog which, admittedly is my fault for doing book cover posts on that genre. Also, PDF, so, pirate books, great.😂😂😂
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My posts get about 50-100 views each. The Reach got (and is still accumulating) over 650. 500+ of those were the year after I posted it 😂
One search term on mine is ‘how do I make dark purple’ strangely enough.
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Sounds like a filler story that he just decided to include–definitely will make not when I’m going through this collection so I can skip it. Great review!
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It’s one of those stories that I just really can’t say what it is. To say it is a filler story is insulting to filler stories haha
Thank you 🙂
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I remember that saying about Homer falling asleep sometimes, to indicate that his prose was not always up to standards, and if that happened to a myth like Homer, even Stephen King can fall prey to that problem… 🙂
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Happens to Stephen King in a lot of his work … mostly his endings 🙈 on the whole the most of his work is very good, though. As you say, everyone is allowed an off-story.
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Sort of laughed out loud at the kids and their homework comment. 😛 I used to think that too for some of my older reviews, especially classics like Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll and Hyde. This was an interesting review though. Who would’ve thought?
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Its insane how many essay question searches get done for my ‘The Reach’ review 😂 I’m half-tempted to re-write the review to be more essay friendly haha
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I too neglected a Stephen king book similar to this years ago. It’s still on my shelf. If I could try and get through another few pages I would, it just didn’t make sense to me
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HUGE fan though. Just depends on the book really
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Some of his things (especially his endings) are really hit and miss. Which was it you struggled to get through?
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I would have to check on the book when I get home from work. It’s been a couple of years (lol). I believe it was a whole bunch of short stories. The book was huge and interesting from what I was able to put together but you really had to know what was going on in his mind while reading or else you’d be lost
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