Misery was originally going to be a Bachman Book. Misery originally had a different ending. Misery is a deeply personal novel that crystallises many of the demons that Stephen King was fighting at the time of its inception. Misery is a single location novel that is never inert even when it's confined to a bed. Misery is a towering work even if it ends five inches shorter than it started.
Another Australian crime debut, The Nowhere Child sees Christian White spreading his intrigue across two continents: Australia and North America. The small town this time around is in Kentucky, which is already a point of difference; Nowhere Child is a mildly intriguing piece that makes up in craft what it lacks in event.
By 2013, it was well and truly clear that Stephen King was his own genre, and that he competes largely with himself. This is likely why, outside of The Dark Tower series and Black House, that he had never really dabbled with sequels until Doctor Sleep. That King chose to make his first major sequel to the book that became one of the most iconic horror films of all time — a film that, coincidentally, he famously really did not like — was daring. Doctor Sleep is the thirty six years on sequel to The Shining, through which King follows up on what happened to Danny after the Overlook Hotel was neutralised. And it works: Doctor Sleep is excellent latter day King, a successor to The Dark Tower, a pre-cursor to Mr. Mercedes, and a novel that doesn’t try to shamelessly ape its predecessor.
If Australian publishing is having a moment, it's largely thanks to Australian crime. Scrublands is another rural Australian crime novel about a depressed town reeling from the after effects of a multiple murder. Former SBS journalist Chris Hammer has taken advantage of a thirsty market with a remarkably greedy novel of his own: between the pages of Scrublands, no crime goes uncommitted.
In The Institute, we unlock the paradox of Stephen King: much of his best work is familiar and comfortable, echoing across the years, spanning decades. However, there is such a thing as too familiar: when King uses one his skeletons but forgets to put the muscle on the bones, the books suffer. The Institute is the ghost of a Stephen King novel: it has the spirit, but not the flesh. It's fine, but it's not much more than that.
The biggest book of 2019 doesn't have boy wizards in it, fake conspiracies about renaissance artists, secretly evil women, Swedish conspiracy theorists, or teenagers in battles royale. Instead, Margaret Atwood is hailed as the conquering hero, returning readers to Gilead some 34 years after the initial publication of The Handmaid's Tale. The Testaments is not exactly the sequel everyone was clamouring for — the further adventures of Offred — but it's the best possible use of the setting that Atwood could have employed. The Testaments is not warm and cuddly, but it takes a different tone to the nightmarish bitterness that characterised its predecessor: it fair zips along.
Kameron Hurley's heart belongs to novels. Meet Me in the Future's introduction tells the reader as much instantly. And yet this is her second collection (third, depending on whether you believe the book itself or Hurley's Wikipedia). To that end, some parts of Meet Me in the Future are considerably stronger than others. These stories represent Hurley's particular fascinations: womens' place in society, the impermanence of bodies; plague and pathology. Some she communicates well in sparkling stories, but others collapse under their own weight.
There have been enough Stephen King adaptations in recent years that the man doesn't need to be introduced anymore. It, the second longest of his 61 novels to date, performed remarkably well in its secretly titled Chapter One instalment of 2017. Two years later, the Loser kids are back, they've brought their adult counterparts with them, their film is 34 whole minutes longer, and everything is like a well worn pair of slippers.
Carol Jordan and Tony Hill have been through a lot in their eleven books together, and they each know that they wilt outside of each other's presence. In this latest instalment, Val McDermid finally allows Carol to process the extreme PTSD that has cropped up over two and a half decades worth of adventures and, as these things go, How The Dead Speak is a progress novel in what has become an increasingly stop-start pattern for these characters.
Nathan Hill's decade-in-the-writing debut The Nix is a densely packed novel, to the point that some might call it overstuffed. At 640 pages, cut down from the original (longhand!) 1,200 page version, Hill has a lot to say … and he says much of it very well.
