Read: Wolves of the Calla–“Overholser”

I didn’t read much and don’t have a whole lot to say about what I read, other than the more of the made-up lingo and speech patterns King gives us, the more I enjoy it. It comes so natural! Say thankya, I beg, if it do ya fine…I totally want to throw these onto the ends of all my sentences. This is actually quite an achievement on King’s part, because anyone who remembers reading Spider-Man 2099 as a high-schooler will tell you that invented dialect is just a “what the shock?” away from complete insufferability.

Aside from that I had two insights:

1) For a while now I’ve been giving myself a hard time for giving King such a hard time about this 19 business. You may not know this about me, but the use of the 23 enigma and the Law of Fives in The Illuminatus! Trilogy blew my goddamn mind and was a philosophical and even political touchstone of mine for years. It was also just plain entertaining as hell to read. Isn’t King just doing the same thing? The answer is no, because RAW and Shea didn’t just slap a number into their books out of nowhere–they dug up every conceivable iteration of 23 and 5 (and sometimes 17) in the real world, and used that as the springboard for their characters’ birthdays and the number of potential ways to immanentize the eschaton and so forth. Doing that is a far cry from being all “wow, this supporting characte’s’ name is 19 letters long!” as though you, the author, had nothing to do with that.

2) I want to finish these books so I can find out how it all plays out, but honestly I think I could read the wikipedia entries and find that perfectly satisfying in terms of the main reason I’m reading this series, which is to unearth the secrets behind King’s cosmology.

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