{Short Read Sunday} Cain Rose Up by Stephen King – A Book Review

Wow, sort of a bi-weekly thing at the minute. That’s massive for me seeing as how I normally do one of these Short Read Sunday posts, say I’ll keep it regular then not do it for six months. Here’s hoping I actually keep my word to myself, as this is really the best/easiest way for me to get through short story anthologies at the same time as reading proper novels.

The following info is for Skeleton Crew rather than the short story in particular, as that is the collection it is from.

 

Author: Stephen King

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Release Date: 22/03/2010

Genre: Horror

Pages: Story page count unknown as part of larger collection

My Chosen Format: Kindle

My Rating for ‘Cain Rose Up’: 2 out of 5

 

Other short story reviews from Skeleton Crew:

The Monkey

Here There Be Tygers

The Reaper’s Image

The Reach

 

Review:

Cain Rose Up just kind of feels like a nothing story. At the start I wasn’t sure if the main character was on some sort of acid trip, but it just seems to be set in an American highschool/college that ends up being about a mentally unstable kid who starts a school shooting.

The title is in reference to the little insane thing he says about Cain and Abel and God being a vegetarian, all incredibly weird and almost nonsensical. I really didn’t feel as though there was a point to the story other than King wanted to write a short story where a psycho gets a gun and shoots his school up.

There felt like there was no story to it and all of the characters just either had really strange names, (hence why I thought it was an acid trip to start with) were pretty simple/boring/one-dimensional and none of them seem to add anything to the piece. In
all fairness, this could have been the main character mentally distancing himself from everyone.

All in all, I’m not too unhappy with it.  With it being so short it wasn’t as much a waste of time as it could have been. King got the insanity/mild religious zealotry part down pretty good.

Not the worst story I have read from Skeleton Crew, but not one I’d recommend anyone to read for its quality.