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Lisey's Story
- Narrated by: Mare Winningham
- Length: 19 hrs and 21 mins
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Just pathetic!!
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"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger...." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922", the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.
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Eerie, honest, frightening!
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Since his wife died, Ralph Roberts has been having trouble sleeping. Each night he wakes up a bit earlier until he's barely sleeping at all. During his late-night walks, he observes some strange things going on in Derry, Maine. He sees colored ribbons streaming from people's heads, two strange little men wandering around town after dark, and more. He begins to suspect that these visions are something more than hallucinations brought on by lack of sleep.
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Great story, horrible production!
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The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everyone's cell phone. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature...and then begins to evolve.
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Very, very compelling
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Under the Dome
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On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when - or if - it will go away.
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Glad I Listened to 11-22-63 First
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Performance
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On a brisk autumn day, a 13-year-old boy stands on the shores of the gray Atlantic, near a silent amusement park and a fading ocean resort called the Alhambra. The past has driven Jack Sawyer here: His father is gone, his mother is dying, and the world no longer makes sense. But for Jack everything is about to change. For he has been chosen to make a journey back across America - and into another realm. One of the most influential and heralded works of fantasy ever written, The Talisman is an extraordinary novel of loyalty, awakening, terror, and mystery.
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All the stories in this collection from Stephen King are related to the Vietnam War. King fans will recognize echoes of The Dark Tower series in the collection's first story, "Low Men in Yellow Coats." As the characters develop over the next four stories, King's version of the Vietnam War becomes one of his most frightening tales ever.
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Touching, Funny - Amazingly well written and read.
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'Salem's Lot (Movie Tie-in)
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Writer Ben Mears has returned to his hometown of Jerusalem's Lot with the hope that moving into a delapidated mansion, long the subject of town lore, might help him get a handle on his life and provide inspiration for a new book. But when two young boys venture into the woods and only one comes out alive, Mears begins to realize that there may be something sinister at work.
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A Great Performance of an Excellent Story
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Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.
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From a Buick 8
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Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.
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Narration nightmare
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Just After Sunset
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Just After Sunset - call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.
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King scores another coup
- By Jeff G. on 03-21-09
By: Stephen King
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Gerald's Game
- By: Stephen King
- Narrated by: Lindsay Crouse
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic getaway. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games, but when Gerald refuses to stop, the evening ends with deadly consequences. Still handcuffed, Jessie is trapped and alone. Over the next 28 hours, in the lakeside house that has become a prison, Jessie will come face to face with all the things she has ever feared.
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Please get rid of the sound effects
- By Peeps on 12-29-16
By: Stephen King
Publisher's summary
Now an Apple TV+ limited series starring Julianne Moore and Clive Owen
The “haunting...tender, intimate book that makes an epic interior journey” (The New York Times), Lisey’s Story is a literary masterpiece - an extraordinarily moving and haunting portrait of a marriage and its aftermath.
Lisey lost her husband, Scott, two years ago, after a 25-year marriage of profound and sometimes frightening intimacy. Scott was an award-winning, best-selling novelist and a very complicated man. Early in their relationship, before they married, Lisey knew there was a place Scott went - a place that both terrified and healed him, could eat him alive or give him the ideas he needed in order to live. Now it’s Lisey’s turn to face Scott’s demons, to go to that terrifying place known as Boo’ya Moon. What begins as a widow’s effort to sort through the papers of her celebrated husband becomes a nearly fatal journey into the darkness he inhabited.
“Intricate...exhilarating” (The New Yorker), perhaps Stephen King’s most personal and powerful novel ever, Lisey’s Story is about the wellsprings of creativity, the temptations of madness, and the secret language of love. It is a beautiful, “rich portrait of a marriage, and the complicated affection that outlives death” (The Washington Post).
Critic reviews
"As much about the facets of longtime marriage as it is about the characters themselves, Lisey's Story offers a poignant glimpse at abiding love and the tides of grief, and the internal language of relationships of all kinds." (Atlantic Monthly)
"In Lisey's Story, Stephen King makes bold, brilliant use of his satanic storytelling gift, his angelic ear for language, and above all his incomparable ability to find the epic in the ordinary." (Michael Chabon)
"Lisey's Story is bright and brilliant. It's dark and desperate. While I'll always consider The Shining, my first ride on King's wild Tilt-A-Whirl, a gorgeous, bloody jewel, I found, on this latest ride, a treasure box heaped with dazzling gems. A few of them have sharp, hungry teeth." (Nora Roberts)
Featured Article: Stephen King’s 20 Best Audiobooks—The Definitive List
Stephen King is one of the most prolific American authors of all time. He has published 61 novels, more than 200 short stories, and six nonfiction books—and he shows no sign of stopping. His most recent novel, The Institute, was published in September of 2019, and we’ve already pre-ordered his novella anthology If It Bleeds, which is set to be released in 2020. With such a large portfolio, choosing one listen to start with can be daunting.
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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Something for Everyone
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
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The Stand
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This is the way the world ends: with a nanosecond of computer error in a Defense Department laboratory and a million casual contacts that form the links in a chain letter of death. And here is the bleak new world of the day after: a world stripped of its institutions and emptied of 99 percent of its people. A world in which a handful of panicky survivors choose sides - or are chosen.
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Still Good
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- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Rebecca Mitchell, Michael Healy, and others
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Only a few decent stories in this bunch.
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By: Ellen Datlow - author/editor, and others
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Shadow Show
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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Mixed Bag
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No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies - before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
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GOD'S WAITING ROOM; AKA FLORIDA
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By: Joe Hill
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Rabbit, Run
- By: John Updike
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his - or any other - generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is 26 years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty - even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness, and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path.
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A Thinking Man's Novel
- By L. Berlyne on 01-12-09
By: John Updike
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Our Story Begins
- New and Selected Stories
- By: Tobias Wolff
- Narrated by: Anthony Heald
- Length: 13 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.
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Great
- By chris on 04-11-08
By: Tobias Wolff
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Wonder Boys
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 11 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn't grown up. He's now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer.
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A strong, early Chabon (sounds like grading wine)
- By Darwin8u on 03-09-14
By: Michael Chabon
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Outside Looking In
- A Novel
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: Johnathan McClain
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1943, LSD is synthesized in Basel. Two decades later, a coterie of grad students at Harvard are gradually drawn into the inner circle of renowned psychologist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Timothy Leary. Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology PhD student, and his wife, Joanie, become entranced by the drug’s possibilities such that their “research” becomes less a matter of clinical trials and academic papers and instead turns into a freewheeling exploration of mind expansion, group dynamics, and communal living.
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STORYTELLING AS CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING
- By Christopher Meeks on 05-25-19
By: T. C. Boyle
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The Funhouse
- By: Dean Koontz
- Narrated by: Karen Peakes
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Once there was a girl who ran away and joined a traveling carnival. She married a man she grew to hate - and gave birth to a child she could never love. A child so monstrous that she killed it with her own hands.… Twenty-five years later, Ellen Harper has a new life, a new husband, and two normal children - Joey loves monster movies, and Amy is about to graduate from high school. But their mother drowns her secret guilt in alcohol and prayer.
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Early, not so good, Koontz
- By Michael on 02-15-15
By: Dean Koontz
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The Keep
- The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
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At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
- By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Zombies: More Recent Dead
- By: Neil Gaiman, Carrie Vaughn, Caitlin R. Kiernan, and others
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt, Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 20 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The living dead are more alive than ever! Zombies have become more than an iconic monster for the 21st century: They are now a phenomenon constantly revealing as much about ourselves - and our fascination with death, resurrection, and survival - as our love for the supernatural or post-apocalyptic speculation. Our most imaginative literary minds have been devoured by these incredible creatures and produced exciting, insightful, and unflinching new works of zombie fiction.
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A well blended mix
- By The Lone Mopper on 07-30-15
By: Neil Gaiman, and others
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The Hum and the Shiver
- The Tufa Novels, Book 1
- By: Alex Bledsoe
- Narrated by: Emily Janice Card, Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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No one knows where the Tufa came from or how they ended up in the mountains of east Tennessee. When the first Europeans came to the Smoky Mountains, the Tufa were already there. Dark-haired and enigmatic, they live quietly in the hills and valleys of Cloud County, their origins lost to history. But there are clues in their music, hidden in the songs they have passed down for generations.
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Excellent story that combines music and folklore
- By T. L. Walker on 10-01-15
By: Alex Bledsoe
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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NOS4A2
- A Novel
- By: Joe Hill
- Narrated by: Kate Mulgrew
- Length: 19 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn't tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself.
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Gripping performance by Kate Mulgrew....
- By Leslie on 05-06-13
By: Joe Hill
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Very, very compelling
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"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger...." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922", the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.
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Eerie, honest, frightening!
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A terrible accident takes Edgar Freemantle's right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. When his marriage suddenly ends, Edgar begins to wish he hadn't survived his injuries. He wants out. His psychologist suggests a new life distant from the Twin Cities, along with something else.
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Play the Book and Let the Book Play You
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Blaze is the story of Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., of the crimes committed against him and the crimes he commits, including his last, the kidnapping of a baby heir worth millions. Blaze has been a slow thinker since childhood, when his father threw him down the stairs and then threw him down again. After escaping an abusive institution for boys when he was a teenager, Blaze hooks up with George, a seasoned criminal who thinks he has all the answers.
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Good story
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Touching, Funny - Amazingly well written and read.
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Cell
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The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everyone's cell phone. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature...and then begins to evolve.
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Very, very compelling
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Eerie, honest, frightening!
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Play the Book and Let the Book Play You
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Good story
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Rosie Daniels leaves her husband, Norman, after 14 years in an abusive marriage. She is determined to lose herself in a place where he won't find her. She'll worry about all the rest later. Alone in a strange city, she begins to make a new life, and good things finally start to happen. Meeting Bill is one, and getting an apartment is another. Still, it's hard for Rosie not to keep looking over her shoulder, and with good reason. Norman is a cop, with the instincts of a predator.
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Excellent!
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Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.
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Narration nightmare
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Frank Muller was the best
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In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: They become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent; and while they sleep they go to another place.... The men of our world are abandoned, left to their increasingly primal devices. One woman, however, the mysterious Evie, is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease.
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Just pathetic!!
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Dolores Claiborne
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Overall
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Story
Dolores Claiborne is suspected of killing Vera Donovan, her wealthy employer, and when the police question her, she tells the story of her life, harkening back to her disintegrating marriage and the suspicious death of her violent husband 30 years earlier. Dolores also tells of Vera's physical and mental decline and how she became emotionally demanding in recent years.
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Absolutely Fantastic!
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By: Stephen King
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Revival
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In a small New England town, over half a century ago, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister. Charles Jacobs, along with his beautiful wife, will transform the local church. The men and boys are all a bit in love with Mrs. Jacobs; the women and girls feel the same about Reverend Jacobs - including Jamie’s mother and beloved sister, Claire. With Jamie, the Reverend shares a deeper bond based on a secret obsession.
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Sinister and Classic King
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Desperation
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Located off a desolate stretch of Interstate 50, Desperation, Nevada, has few connections with the rest of the world. It is a place, though, where the seams between worlds are thin. And it is a place where several travelers are abducted by Collie Entragian, the maniacal police officer of Desperation. Entragian uses various ploys for the abductions, from an arrest for drug possession to "rescuing" a family from a nonexistent gunman.
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Once again unabridged
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Just After Sunset
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Just After Sunset - call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.
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King scores another coup
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By: Stephen King
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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
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Anne Heche reads The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the story of nine-year-old Trisha McFarland who gets lost in the woods while on a walk with her family. Boston Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon becomes Trisha's imaginary companion - and the key to her survival against an unidentified someone (or some thing) leaving death and destruction in its wake.
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Amber Alert
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By: Stephen King
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The Dark Half
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Thad Beaumont would like to say he is innocent. He'd like to say he has nothing to do with the twisted imagination that produced his best-selling novels. He'd like to say he has nothing to do with the series of monstrous murders that keep coming closer to his home. But how can Thad deny the ultimate embodiment of evil that goes by the name he gave it - and signs its crimes with Thad's bloody fingerprints?
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Sparrows
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By: Stephen King
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Elevation
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Although Scott Carey doesn’t look any different, he’s been steadily losing weight. There are a couple of other odd things, too. He weighs the same in his clothes and out of them, no matter how heavy they are. Scott doesn’t want to be poked and prodded. He mostly just wants someone else to know, and he trusts Doctor Bob Ellis. In the small town of Castle Rock, the setting of many of King’s most iconic stories, Scott is engaged in a low-grade - but escalating - battle with the lesbians next door whose dog regularly drops his business on Scott’s lawn. One of the women is friendly; the other, cold as ice.
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Meh...
- By Wendy on 12-11-18
By: Stephen King
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Billy Summers
- By: Stephen King
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- Unabridged
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Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?
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Absolutely amazing
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 08-03-21
By: Stephen King
What listeners say about Lisey's Story
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Joseph
- 11-24-08
Oh, wow.
This one shook and rattled me throughout. There are two Stephen Kings, apparently. There is the superficial monster-story writer who creates fascinating and creepy tales of humans fighting for survival amongst supernatural carnage, and there is the keen observer of the human condition who tells stories of human exploration of grief and joy, happiness and bitterness, love, death, and the whole range of questions surrounding human existence.
This book has both, but it concentrates on the latter. Told through the eyes of a middle-aged widow haunted by her famous husband's legacy, this is maybe the most sober story King has told. The heroine is not super-human, is not exceptional in the way most heroes are, yet she struggles through emotional turmoil, real life catastrophes, and a supernatural force she cannot fully grasp. The writing is powerful and touching, with vivid scenes of mystery and horror, as well as tender scenes of loss, grief, redemption, and understanding.
And through it all is a thinly-veiled timeless metaphor which is easier to recognize than identify.
Read this one, "Bag of Bones," and "Duma Key," and you might just find yourself comparing King not unfavorably to Charles Dickens, for his observation of the everyday world and his introspective identification of human motives. True, whereas Dickens often had a light, humorous prose, King's is nostalgic bordering on morose, but both reach beyond the story they are telling to touch on truths just out of your reach.
Yeah, I liked it.
And the reading by Mare Winningham is as impressive as King's writing in this. Maybe moreso, at times. She puts a delicate interpretation on lines, even words, that draw out elements you don't notice otherwise.
Good story, good read. Highly recommended.
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135 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lesley
- 01-30-07
It's a love story--it's a horror story--it's both
I just finished Lisey's Story today, and I have to say that if this book and Cell signal a new turn for Stephen King, I'm happy about it.
As with Cell, King is talking about bigger things within the context of horror, but with this book he's also talking about them within the context of a long marriage. This time they're the presence of love, and language and myth.
Lisey's Story doesn't follow the standard King map many may expect. Nobody's holed up in a cellar or a car or an abandoned building with a monster at the door. There are horrific parts and suspenseful parts, but those looking for a gorefest will probably be disappointed.
That may be the reason why some reviewers complained about a slow start. I didn't find it slow, however; the seed of the plot is planted when the "incuncs" are introduced. "Incunc" is Lisey's malapropism for "incunabula," or rare, unpublished manuscripts that are often in the author's own hand. Scholars expect that Lisey's departed husband, a writer, has left some behind and they want to get their hands on them. The scholars are what Lisey calls the "incuncs," and the book goes back and forth between their presence in the present time, and Lisey's memories of her marriage.
I'm not a big love story person, so I almost didn't get this book. But I'm glad I did. This isn't Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett; this is two messed-up people, both with problems, who managed to stay together and like it in spite of everything. I found that inspiring and touching.
Moreover, King's prose style has improved a lot over the last three decades (as we might hope!), but he still knows how to tell a good story. Mare Winningham does a great job on the narration as well. Highly recommended.
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117 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Jan
- 09-08-13
Why Didn't I Read This Before Now?
We should just quit reviewing King. The words have all been said. I hope he's exercising and eating right, because it's going to be one sad day when he's gone.
I passed this novel by for several years, and I don't know why. It's excellent and his storyline blows in a different direction..more driven by character development than by horror and suspense. Although there is plenty of that also.
If you haven't read it, you might as well put it in your cart. You're going to soon or later anyway.
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Overall
- A. Jack
- 07-03-07
Vintage, Mature SK
Lisey's story was a superb reflection of how this writer's mind works minus unnecessary gore. Story was spellbinding, building slowly to an incredible finish. The reader was one of the finest I've heard and she made the story come to life.
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Overall
- JimmyD
- 11-08-06
Good King Craft, But Don't Start Here
I had a difficult time getting into this King creation, and I discovered that I had to be patient to let the unique language and pace settle in my brain. If you're a fan of King, you can expect some parallels from other books: strong character development, unique abilities to travel back and forth between other worlds (not "The Territories" here but instead "Boo'ya Moon"), and King-isms/unique phrases ("blood-bool," and "puffickly huh-yooge") that repeat like a gnawing musical motif that you can't get out of your head. What you'll find unique is that this is a more cerebral work that likely won't grab your attention right off the bat. In fact, you may feel "smucking" frustrated by the language and the jumps in the time-line of the narrative. These seem to be intentional literary devices that King has mastered, so be patient... it serves its own purpose.
I've read everything that King has put out, starting with the Bachman books before I even knew they were Stephen King. If I had started with this book, I might be inclined to not read anything else by him, but as a fan in for the long-haul, this work has its place, and I enjoyed the slow mind-screw that the book provided.
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- liveon2legs
- 06-09-09
King at his best
I listened to Duma Key before this and based off the reviews of the two books, was expecting less than I got from this than I did Duma Key.
When I read a horror story, I want something more than just a combination of scary moments. I want the scary thing in the story, whatever it is, to have real substance. I felt that in Lisey's Story, more so than most of his other works, King hit upon something very real and very evil. My favorite King work to date.
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- Carol
- 09-24-07
Masterful
My first review for audible.com. I'm compelled to write in defense of this title, which some other readers haven't liked much.
It is all we love about Steven King. Masterful use of language to paint a vivid scene, often so recognizable from our own experience that it brings a smile. Characters so real they nearly leap from the page (or headphones, as the case may be...) A story so enthralling it's hard to forget.
Expertly read by Mare Winningham. No fancy studio effects, just simply and convincingly read aloud with appropriate emphasis in all the right places. She executes local dialects easily and consistently, without distracting from the power of the words of dialog. I would love to hear more from this reader.
Yes, a good deal of the story is told in flashbacks and internal dialog. You do have to pay attention to hold your place and time in the story. But that's a bargain that King often makes with his readers, and Oh! it's well worth meeting the challenge.
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- krista
- 11-06-06
Atypical
For King fans, this listen will be a bit more cerebral, and a good deal less traditional King Creepshow. From that perspective, Lisey's Story is a masterpiece of fiction, seasoned by King's ability to transform the mundane aspects of life into otherworldly, magical elements. It becomes almost autobiographical in the detailed journey through the details held within writer's imagination, The Pool, and the reader's ability to hitch a ride for a voyeuristic dip. Not a traditional horror format, Lisey's Story is a personal description of the ways and means of authorship, the guts of the writer's mind, and the interaction between the real world and The Pool, just under the surface, but not available to all, offered not to frighten, but rather validate and explain.
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- Kim
- 06-05-07
A Sweet Story
Those King fans looking for Cujo, Carrie, or The Shining will probably not like this book. Those looking for The Green Mile or Shawshank Redemption probably will.
I truly loved this book and found myself thinking over and over about my husband and our crazy quirks. Many days after listening and getting home after my daily commute I hugged him a little harder.
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- JeninChicago
- 04-17-07
Spellbound from the first moment...
I am a fan of Mr. King's earlier works, I wasn't much in love with The Cell; but this one. Oh this one....
Some people have said they've gotten lost in the language. I, too, have gotten lost. But in that magical way that happens when charaters come to life. Every family has an "inner language". It's just a question of listening long enough to understand what they're saying. This tale was beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, and an absolute anthem to love. But let's not forget, this is still the talented Mr. King, and he does not disappoint. That essential feeling of something lurking just out of sight or beyond the grasp of our Everyday Senses is right there; a thread running continuously throughout this magnificent tale.
And then there's the reader. Mare Winningham did an amazing job of characterizing the voices; even her breath and whispers were impeccably timed. Ms. Winningham's voice picked me up, envelopped me and surrounded me with the lives of people who seemed so real.
Well done! to both Mr. King for the creation of this superbly written work and to Ms. Winningham for her telling of same.
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