Ever since I discovered the connection between Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and his Dark Tower series, I’ve always been intrigued by King’s second novel. But I never got around to buying the book until BookBub ran a featured deal this fall. I snapped it up and dove into ‘Salem’s Lot just in time for Halloween….
The other day I was looking at the top shelf of my bookshelf and realized it contains a number of beautiful hardcover books, but they’re not necessarily my favorite novels (due, in part, to the fact that I keep my Bernard Cornwell novels together, and every book I own of The Warlord Chronicles are all…
Last week, I mentioned how my upcoming novel, Enoch’s Device, was a bit of a journey tale. This was a reference to a series of posts I wrote on Long Journeys about a year ago, during a time when I was travelling constantly, with little time to write. A year later, I find myself in…
In the final installment in my series on the Top 5 Elements of a Great Epic, I’m focusing on Grand Events – those major conflicts that makes a great epic so breathtaking. Grand events are critical because they are a primary vehicle through which the author shows how huge the stakes are in the story. They…
Every story needs a protagonist, and often he or she possesses qualities that could be described as “heroic.” A great epic, however, needs a hero in the truest sense of the word. Just look at three of the first four definitions in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to see what I mean: Definition of HERO a mythological…
Great epics often span considerable time periods. That’s one of the reason these novels tend to look like small telephone books in hard copy. These aren’t 90,000 word novels like so many popular thrillers, which move at break-neck speed and sometimes account for a mere 24 hours (or less) of story time. No, epics are…
For this week’s “beginning,” I’m going back to one of the great journey tales by Stephen King, his second book in The Dark Tower series: The Drawing of the Three. Here’s how it begins, after this image of the book’s cover: The gunslinger came awake from a confused dream which seemed to consist of a…
I adore epic fiction. It’s likely the fault of George Lucas and J.R.R. Tolkien. I was eight when Star Wars came out in 1977, and I’ll never forget staring wide-eyed at the opening image of the rebel ship and that star destroyer. Then Darth Vader emerged through that smoke-filled portal and it blew my mind. Later that…
Last week’s review of The Wind Through The Keyhole had me thinking about another of Stephen King’s more fairy tale-like books, The Eyes of the Dragon (you can read my review of it here). This is one of those rare novels that pulls off the use of an omniscient, storytelling narrator, and here’s how it…
My summer reading has gotten off to great start, and one book I finished very quickly was Stephen King’s new entry in his Dark Tower series, The Wind Through The Keyhole. It was a tremendously fun read, and my review follows this image of the book’s cover. Within the novel’s first two pages, I found myself…
In the third post in my series on Narrative Viewpoint: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly, I’m focusing on the good for a change, the viewpoint that I think works best for most stories: third-person limited. A great example of this viewpoint is George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Each…