Vive la Tabby!

I just found out Tabitha King has another book out. Yay! She’s one of my favorite writers, although I didn’t realize it at first. Sure, I knew her books were engrossing stories about gritty characters who lived and loved at full tilt, but these same characters sometimes did things so incredibly stupid and screwed up their lives so royally that I found myself yelling at them on the pages of the books and sometimes throwing said books across the room, swearing I wasn’t going to finish reading them.

Of course, I did finish them. All of them. Some of them I’ve even read more than once, because I found myself thinking about those infuriating characters of hers long after I’d finished the books. That’s when I realized what an amazing talent Ms. King has for characterization. I might sometimes want to hit her characters upside the head with a limb and knock some sense into them (especially those bad-assed heroines of hers), but I always care about what happens to them and feel as if they’re real people she’s introduced me to. And they love with a depth that endures even the moronic things she makes them do just to stir things up. At least she doesn’t kill off all of them like some other writers who hail from Maine.

Speaking of Steve-O, (I read somewhere that he hates to be called that!) I’ve been known to read a few of his books as well. Okay, ALL of his books. But I don’t read them for the horror content. I read them because he does a pretty decent job of characterization himself, and the imagery he creates in some of his scenes using the simplest objects in the world tend to stick with me forever. I often find myself seeing colored auras around people, sparrows give me the creeps, and I always give sewer drains a wide berth.

What gets me is when I tell someone that I love Tabitha King’s books, and they say, “I didn’t even know Stephen King’s wife was a writer.” Don’t you know she gives him Holy Hell whenever she reads something like that on an Internet message board? I can just see her whacking him on the back of the head and saying, “See, if you weren’t always hogging the limelight with all those silly monster books of yours, maybe people would hear about MY books!”

I’m doing my best to help you get the word out, Tabby.

~Stay true to yourself, and your dreams will come true.