Hello and welcome back to the Constant Reader Podcast, with me Richard Sheppard. Thanks for your kind words about my last interview with James Michels, author of the Melody of Shattered Gold, which is now available on amazon. It’s well worth picking up, the ending is a real gut punch, and the journey is a wild ride.

Speaking of wild rides, today we are going to be looking at the third volume in King’s Dark Tower Series, the Wastelands. If i complained last time that the Drawing of the Three didn’t really have Roland and ka-tet travelling very far, this volume more than makes up for it. It begins with Roland and Jake chambers fixing the psychic rupture caused by Roland abandoning Jake in the Gunslinger, and then going back to fix it by killing Jake’s assassins Jack Mort. It then moves on to the journey to the City of Lud, caught in a Civil War. This is resolved in apocalyptic fashion and the group barely manage to escape the cataclysm on a sentient, suicidal monorail. Heady stuff, and I am honored and privileged as always to have the first lady of Stephen King podcasters, Kim C herself, with me on the quest for the Dark Tower. Kim is a university lecturer in creative writing, who has been educating and entertaining the Stephen King fanbase for a while now with her podcast, The Year of Underrated Stephen King and it’s patreon, the Danse Macabre

Welcome back to the Constant reader Podcast, and thanks for bearing with us during our long hiatus. We have gathered up quite a few of our favorite repeat guests for 2025 though, so i am sure you will forgive us. We have lined up Kim C from the year of underrated Stephen King podcast with another step towards the Dark Tower. The gentlemen from King Con will be giving a report on how their convention on Stephen King, the first of its type, went back in October, and what you might expect from them in the future. Plus Andy Stanton will be back to help me sort out the End of the World As We Know It, the upcoming short story collection based in the world of King's The Stand. Plus we have some new guests, including some big names I can’t reveal just yet.

Today’s guest is one those old friends, James Michels. James was on the show a couple of years ago to talk about The Shawshank Redemption, his own work in the prison industry, and his career as crime writer. We discussed a series of short stories, Life’s Dark Corners, that i urge you to seek out. Today however, he is here to discuss The Melody of Shattered Glass, an ambitious epic novel that depicts the fates of the Oro crime family, one of the last bastions of a mafia that is struggling to identify exactly what it is, and what it stands for in the 21st century. But first, James wanted to talk about Stand by Me, Rob Reiner’s adaptation of King’s novella The Body. It features an incredible cast, a killer soundtrack, a sharp script and has meant a lot of things to a lot of people.

I refer to his new book as The Melody of Shattered Glass, when it is, in fact The Melody of Shattered Gold. A thousand apologies to James for misnaming this book, which has an incredible ending and unforgettable characters.....

As the Dollar Baby experiment comes to its close, i would like to shine a spotlight on some of the more successful films made from the treasure trove of Stephen King's short stories. 'That Feeling' by Paul Inman expertly captures the dark, guilt-ridden themes of the 1998 short story 'That Feeling, You Can Only Say What it is in French'. It's being shown at October's King Con, and tickets for that can still be found here, but hurry, they're going fast.....