If you sell enough books, or enough movie tickets, or designer scents, you get at least one free pass. With Nine Perfect Strangers, on the back of the dual number one New York Times bestsellers Big Little Lies and Truly Madly Guilty and the HBO adaptation of the former, Liane Moriarty has published her free pass. Because really, what is Nine Perfect Strangers? You can read it from cover to cover without being entirely sure. There is something here, but it becomes buried under the extraneous compost that Moriarty tosses about with abandon.

More can be said about Richard Bachman than can be said about Rage, his secret and forbidden debut novel, pulled from the shelves during the early days of school shooting contagion. Written well before school shootings became so common that it is difficult to tell them apart, Rage is a Stephen King piece so early that he was in high school himself when he wrote it.

Richard Bachman is a pseudonym created by Stephen King for a variety of reasons depending on what King feels like telling the reader at the time: Bachman was a way for King to put out more books per year, separate from the King brand; he was a way to get rejected earlier works published after some retooling; he was a chance to see if, eventually, Bachman's books were able to be read, sold, and appreciated separately to the King name; and, to quote 1996's "The Importance of Being Bachman”, an imprint for books written "in a Bachman state of mind: low rage, sexual frustration, crazy good humor, and simmering despair.” 

Rage is not a cry for help, but rather a bitter study of the powerlessness that teenagers can feel, and the most artificial power they can conjure to battle that: a warm gun.

Most of the time, a movie is not better than the book that inspired it. A Simple Favour is not that time. An impossibly stupid book has become a gleefully over the top two hander about two women who need each other, except they really don’t.

Read the full review of A Simple Favour at Trespass.

John Cho uses a computer that always has the camera turned on – basically the nightmare of anyone who uses the internet consistently. Searching is a movie defined by its limitations, but it doesn’t suffer too terribly from them. You just wouldn’t want to watch too many of these screen time movies.

Read the full review of Searching at Trespass.

Things We Didn't See Coming is a trap. In at least one paperback form, it does not have a blurb, just pull quotes. It is not until you open it and get a few stories in that you realise that they are all connected – and only then, if you're me, because three consecutive stories featured a character called Margo. One can't be blamed for not coming to this realisation sooner: Things We Didn't See Coming has the appearance of a collection of short stories, and the majority of them, while post-apocalyptic, appear to deal with apocalypses of different varieties and root causes. The narrator is never named. Each apocalypse is presented without much in the way of context, and it does not need it. But, if you really are allergic to short stories, you may feel free to treat Things We Didn't See Coming as a novel with large time gaps between chapters.

Spoilometer: this write up goes into a fair amount of detail about The Shining. It is not safe if you want to discover the secrets of The Overlook for yourself, because The Shining is one of the more pure delights available on this mortal plane.

The third book in Stephen King's catalogue is The Shining, which is famous for inspiring one of the most iconic films of all time. However, Kubrick's The Shining is the first of many adaptations that King has been disappointed in, to the point that he eventually had to sign an agreement saying that he would stop publicly expressing his distaste for the film.

While The Shining (1980) rightfully has a place in the cinematic canon, The Shining is a novel that we can not (doctor) sleep on. While both Carrie and ‘Salem's Lot had much to recommend them, The Shining is arguably his first masterpiece. Drawing on what we would come to recognise as parts of King's personal, professional, and family life, there are many demons exercised and exorcised between these pages. The Shining is a completely realised work in a way that few novels of any genre are.

The Old West holds an intoxicating allure to the modern mind. Between both versions of Westworld, Back to the Future Part III, City Slickers and The Legend of Curly's Gold alike, as a society we can't help going back there. Whiskey When We're Dry, John Larison's debut novel, is a return to a well that we can visit any number of times without ever exhausting the supply. The West was boundless in the imagination, and can fit many stories; Whiskey When We're Dry is one of the more meditative examples.