[books 2014] New-ish Stephen King

36. Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

This book is described as a hard-boiled detective number, but it's more a psychological thriller where the (retired) detective plays a cat and mouse game with a mass murderer.

By far the best thing about it are the retired detective's two sidekicks, the over-achieving teenager who mows his lawn and fixes his computer, and the deeply damaged woman who is a relative of one of the victims. There are bits where I couldn't put it down, interspersed with bits that dragged. The last quarter was pretty not-put-downable, at least, as is fitting with any crime novel that isn't absolutely hopeless.

It's OK. But I'm waiting for his return to straight-up horror, due out in October.

[film] Les Miserables

In the interest of full disclosure.

Made it maybe 20 minutes in - the song was terrible and didn't look like ever ending.

I don't hate all musicals, or love all musicals - I take each one as it comes. This wasn't grabbing me at all (and I have really low standards), so I sent it back.

It did remind me I've never read the book and I should probably rectify that.

[tv] The X-files

On account of feeling too lousy to do anything these last couple of days, I got out the box set of The X-Files I was given some time ago. I've got through the first two discs of season one.

Due to the separation in time, I had failed to notice just how directly Supernatural has ripped off the X-Files. Only the X-files has a woman as protagonist and women and people of colour doing important high levels jobs throughout. Much as I love Supernatural, the lack of women Doing Important Stuff bugs me a lot.

Otherwise, it's aged pretty well.

The X-Files is the reason I started watching TV as an adult. I hated TV when I was a kid, mainly because of the lack of continuity - something would happen in one episode that you'd expect to change things and then the next week everything was set back to "start" again.

I didn't have a TV throughout university and when I lived in Leeds. I occasionally had housemates who owned one but didn't watch it. Then everyone, including people who didn't watch TV, started talking about the X-Files, and I thought I'd see what it was all about. And then it started having a story arc, and references to past episodes and how that affected the characters.

It's commonplace now, but it was groundbreaking at the time.