an Attempted Book Review - Never Flinch by (master of suspense?) Stephen King
As far as I remember, I never wrote a book review. Not for HIVE, not for anything else. At secondary school, I had to review books, but not on paper. The tests were taken vocally, for books from the category of literature. Since then, I do still read books from this category, but sometimes also outside it. Not much though; And mostly from the non-fiction genre. Although - in recent years - I seem to pick up fictional books again, more and more. Perhaps even reading a non-fictional and a fictional book at the same time. Well, not exactly at the same time, since I cannot multi-thread. I master the art of multitasking only 🙂 What about you? Can you multi-thread reading books?
As you may already noticed, my first ever written book review isn't following the more or less standard format used by many. As I figured out the other day when I tested AI to write a book review for me, the format I see on HIVE is quite similar to what AI presented me. This drove me towards trying to do it differently. You - the reader - will be the judge if my attempt makes sense or not, is useful or not, can be classified as a book review or not at all. Let's wait and see. Looking forward to what you think, therefore urge you to drop your thoughts - whatever they may be - into the comments section down below ⬇️
Enough Intro: Let's get to the Real Deal
A few days ago, I finished a recent book by Stephen King. Title: Never Flinch, published earlier this year. In my teenage years, I read quite a few books by his hand. Since then, never touched any. Instead, seen a few movies, as far as I believe, of which none of the titles come to mind at the time of writing this blog post.
Started the book kinda like 4 or 5 weeks ago. Although the book reads quickly, I progressed kinda like 20 pages per reading round. With days in between these sessions. Not necessarily because I didn't have the time, but because I felt the book was too much dialogue. Perhaps - also - I felt the book to be quite simple from a story point of view, from a style point of view, from a depth point of view and from - excuse me for the 'kinda' repetition - a dialogue point of view. It made me question a few times if I should simply move the book into my archive, either somewhere remote on my bookshelf, or even in one of the cardboard boxes I have in my storage room.
...and then
...last week I found myself reading as much as 100 pages per day! 😱
Somehow, the story got to me. It - for sure - drove me to turn the page even at the end of a new chapter. Not to put a bookmark in, but to read at least the first paragraph. And every time I did this, I devoured the next sub-chapter and yet another one and so on. In a few cases, even the entire main chapter. I think I had 4 such days, over a period of not more than 6 days. Four times, my work commitments the next day pushed me towards closing the book, turning off the lights, and catching some sleepy time with every time too few hours for a comfortable rise in the morning. Four mornings, I realised I should've closed the book a bit sooner than I actually did.
But does what I experienced result in me giving this book a high mark? While writing this blog, I still am not sure what I think about this and will conclude for you and myself.
Intermezzo...
Darn, the number of chapters and sub-chapters in this book. Pfff. Sometimes a sub-chapter was shorter than one page, in a few cases even two sub-chapters on a single page. Why? Why is this needed? I suppose it is easier for the reader to follow the structure.
The Story
I don't like to go into a summary of at least the intro and/or first part of the book, since this can be read anywhere on the Internet, or given by any AI in a much better way than I will ever be able to do. But I need to explain something to substantiate my earlier claim on the structure of the book.
The story is told from the viewpoint of at least 7 characters, of which 3 are the main ones.
Two of them are the so-called bad individuals, and the other 5 belong to the good side. A serial killer in the making and a crazy pro-lifer. Both co-leaders. A detective 'Holly' (with the master leading role), a police officer and a close friend of Holly, a poet and a close friend of Holly as well. A bystander and friend who got himself involved because he is getting bored writing his own non-fictional novel. And a famous Jazz singer.
morrrrre Thoughts
Slowly, I came to the realisation that Holly wasn't a new character. She starred in earlier works of master King. Still, am not sure if Stephen is a master in my own view, but he is considered a - or perhaps 'the' - master of suspense. I suppose one of the reasons why I read quite a few books by his mind and hands back in the 80s and early 90s.
Helped by the big, wide Internet, I learned my hunch was and is correct. Holly has been presented to the world in earlier works. Seven of them in total, thus far. She saw daylight back in 2014. Since then, she appeared - likely in the leading role - in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2023 and in the book I read and talk about here, in 2025.
Is Stephen out of ideas for new material, new characters? Is he riding the commercial waves? Milking the system? Is the use of the same character(s) in such a short period of time the reason for my initial thoughts and feelings? To ditch the book for something better? The fact, Holly was used so many times isn't helping to regard his work highly. At least, not in my 'book'. But then again, I raced through the last 400 pages, almost faster than any transport vehicle in existence, including the rockets 'we' shoot to our moon and Mars 😱
I was a little - more than that, in fact - astonished when I read the works of Stephen to be regarded as literature. Perhaps more like popular literature, but still, literature. His writing style feels a bit too shallow for this, too simple, too ... well ... I mentioned already before, too much dialogue. Overall, I found the story a bit too predictable.
Salient detail: the AI I asked to write a review for me (link down below) was for this book. The result I got said almost the opposite. It wrote the story has great suspense moments with sudden shifts and feels remarkably unpredictable. Perhaps AI was remotely correct, but not more than remotely. I can not conclude it was unpredictable to me. That said, I devoured 100 pages per reading session, finishing the book in 4 of those, over a period of just 6 days, while I didn't necessarily have the time for such sessions.
What made me do this?
I do not know. Finally, he got my attention, and I wasn't able to break free.
Kudos for Stephen, that's for sure, BIG ASS KUDOS.
Resources
Never Flinch on Stephen King website
My AI ask/response: AI review - Useless for my Blog Post but interesting nonetheless
an original
Comments
6 commentsIt's so funny how you want to abandon a book because it seems "simple" or has too much dialogue, and then suddenly, bam!, you find yourself devouring 100 pages in one sitting, sacrificing hours of sleep. I think that's King's trick: even though sometimes you feel like he's "milking" Holly's character or that the plot is predictable, he has this strange ability to hook you.
What you said about the ultra-short chapters and sub-chapters is a double-edged sword: sometimes it disrupts the rhythm, but it's also the perfect trap for saying "well, I'll read one more" (and it's never just one more 😂). Thanks for the honesty; sometimes "imperfect" reviews are the ones that help you the most to decide whether to read something or not. Cheers!
Honestly, I don't remember the style of writing of his books back in the 80s when I read multiple King books. I do remember going to the library and regularly taking home one from his oeuvre. Must be something that hooked me. Perhaps the 7 instead of the usual 1 or 2 characters' viewpoints and thoughts helped.
That might be so true!
Thanks much 🙏
Congratulations @edje! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)
Your next target is to reach 14500 replies.
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPI for the most part feel as though this is a vast majority of everything that King writes. I have found his books very easy to consume and that is likely why they always sell well. I don't, however, necessarily think that his stories are actually all that good. He has written a lot of books and I have noticed that some of them start to sound like a formula that he has reoccurring in a lot of his works. I don't tend to get very excited when he has a new release because they are kind of, well, all the same to me anymore. They are page-turners sure, but that doesn't mean that they are necessarily any good.
My last experience with him was a book called Fairy Tale and it was easy to read but exceptionally stupid and predictable.
Oh and to address the part of what you said that I highlighted: I feel as though all of his books, especially the most recent ones, could easily be half as long as they are...perhaps even shorter than that. he loves to fill up the pages with incredible levels of description that I find completely unnecessary. A lot of authors do this but over time I have learned how to identify a paragraph that is going to be like this and I only read the first and last sentences, which is where the only meaningful text is contained.
Someone just wrote a comment stating that he believes the earlier works of King are better, more complex. I honestly don't know, but I know I was serially reading his books when I was young, high school time. But yeah, I wouldn't easily touch a King book anymore.
Hahaha you are an efficient reader! When I feel a book is written such that I have to skip (part of) a page, I put the book to the side and never open it again. I simply can't spend time with books that I don't like reading all sentences.
Perhaps, these days, a book can be passed through some LLM AI to get a large summary? Would be even more efficient :) I do this with papers and large articles for work. Let it summarise. Or use Notebook LM so I can question a set of articles and papers. Not done this with novels and more scientific books, though.