Rach's Reading Club

Short and snappy first chapter? I never thought about it, but it makes sense. I put that down in my notes, you know, in case I ever accidentally write a book or even bother to finish a NaNo project.

I checked and Audible rates The Outsider as 4.6 and Amazon as 4.5. Unless they left off the original publication date, it was first published in 2018, so the idea of King's style mutating into something you'd like is off the table. But maybe you would have liked some of his earlier work, the work that brought him to fame? The Outsider is part of a series (trilogy? Or maybe that's just as far as he's gotten by now). The 2nd book, If It Bleeds, is also rated 4.6 on Audible. But the 3rd book, Holly, is only 4.1, so if you haven't gone further in that series, I'd suggest it's not worth it. Maybe we're just not King fans.

As for the chapter lengths, 12 of them were over an hour long. That's 12 out of 29, nearly half the chapters! How focused does this man think his readers are?!? Maybe that's the problem. I'm not an hour+ chapter person. I prefer my chapters to be 30 minutes or less, even for listening, though I've gotten more used to cutting a story in the middle of a chapter when I need to go. But as a reader, that would really annoy me, I think. I always read to the end of a chapter, back when I read.

I will say I liked a book of King's short stories I listened to several years ago. It wasn't the best group of short stories, but I liked them. Maybe that's just it. I only have the attention span for his shorter works. I did find that I had trouble remembering who characters were in Black House, but in his defense, the narrator would frequently (though not always) jog our memories pretty well, so that was handy...not as handy as writing a shorter book, but we can't all be great writers AND write long books, regardless of some people's opinions... Maybe King has become one of those writers, based off only a couple of books, that it's not cool to not like, so people think they like him because they're supposed to and if he wrote under another name (which he tried), he wouldn't be so popular (which he wasn't).

BTW, I think it was from that link of 50 pieces of advice I posted yesterday, but someone I was reading about recently posted that their first books were so poorly received that they learned how to write better and had to take a pen name to separate themselves from their pre- and post- educated writing. (They did writer's workshops and conferences and such, I think, not necessarily a degree.) I can see how that would suck.