This is deeply disturbing for me, and I'm used to being disturbed by fiction. I can easily imagine some people, who view King as a populist genre hack, looking down on his retelling of some of our worst atrocities as a species. I personally love Stephen King as a storyteller -- even when his plots are formulaic, his people almost always shine (no pun intended originally, but I kinda like that double meaning upon reflection). He is at his best writing people, and it's hard to take when the people I'm feeling for get eaten by monsters or tortured or evilly enabled by Nazis.
Apt Pupil isn't King's best work, but it includes some great characters (I love the characterizations of Monica and Rubber Ed) and some of his most grisly portrayals of cruelty. The narrator of my audiobook edition, Frank Muller, again does honor to the story and characters. In Muller's tones, Denker steers clear of stereotyped speech patterns. It would be tempting for a reader to soften the hard edges of this story, to add warmth and humanity, but Muller also avoids that temptation.
Tomorrow, I'll talk about the regrettable film of this book.
Once again, the CD version of this audiobook is much cheaper, so the link goes there.
I take it back -- I'm not going to write about the movie. My thoughts about the movie are creepy and very disturbing, and not in a fun Halloween way. I'd have to work for hours to get anything like a real post out of it, and I'm not interested in spending any more time with that movie. It's out of print (here, at least), but if you're a King completist it's not too hard to find an illegal version online.
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