I found The Shining to be a fun and interesting read, but I feel as if it didn’t live up to they hype I expected from it. The first half of the book is very dry and failed to truly bring me in as it set up the characters and the setting. I found myself becoming extremely bored from chapter to chapter and often found myself skimming just to reach a change in the action. I enjoyed the character development and the stories behind our character, but I just became bored of it after the first 100 pages. Once we get to the aspects of the book where the Hotel is getting into Jack’s head, it becomes much more interesting of a read and I found myself wanting to continue to read. The only part of the book that I’m not completely sure I understood or am not sure why Stephen King went this direction is that of the development that Jack is not the one trying to kill his family, but purely the Hotel controlling him. I got a sense throughout the book that Jack had this inner rage that would be fueling him through his later rampage and I truly felt that he was the villain of the book and not the Hotel. Then, however, I got the sense that this development about Jack was purely introduced to provide an entrance for the Hotel into his mind. I feel that Jack’s presence in the book was undercut by this choice and I would have enjoyed it more had Jack been in control of all his actions with just a few pushes from the Hotel to get him rolling.

After finishing Maledicus by Charles French, my current English professor, I can say that it is a very good book for one of French’s first published horror novels. I found the plot which was told through the bouncing back and forth between the four main story lines following, Maledicus our villain, Helen and Helena our victims, Paul and Michel our behind the scenes minor hero, and our main characters of Roosevelt, Sam, and Jeremy. The combination of these four stories through the use of many short chapters helped to create a fully developed story that kept me in the story and never wishing that one chapter would hurry up and end so that I could get back to another character. The addition of our primary villain being a ghost for the days of the Roman Empire who survived history through the passing around of a statue in Maledicus’s own image which contain his link to the living world from the Inbetween, the space between the living world and the afterlife, also added an extra layer of story that kept me wanting to read more. The book of course is not perfect and there are a few instances in which I question some details and dialogue between two of the main characters who have been friends for over 40 years and yet still fight about a nickname that Sam calls Roosevelt, Rosy. After 40 years of knowing each other, friends no longer have these types of conflicts. The way I see it, either Roosevelt would have given into the nickname by the time that the story takes place or Sam would have taken the hint and stopped calling him Rosy years ago. Especially sense the two fought in Vietnam together, these dialogues, which occurred many times throughout the book, made me question the true strength of their friendship.

After reading Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, I would like to comment on some of the blatantly poor scientific processes that Victor Frankenstein follow during his creature of the creature. The arrogance that inflates Victor’s ego is the first step that leads Victor down the path to creating a monster with no thought to how to control his creation. His dropping out of university is questionable due to his thought process that he is smarter than his professors, and this action pulls him away from professional laboratories and extra oversight to his experiments. After this, Victor becomes so obsessed with whether or not he could reanimate a dead corpse that he never stops to think about the repercussions of his actions or how he would deal with the creature once it awoke. The fact that the creature also came alive in the middle of the night while Victor was sleeping is also a point of question. Why would Victor set up his experiment to finalize while he was is a state of weakness and why did his laboratory not have any locks to contain his work. All these point lead me to believe that Victor’s choice to depart from the university and not have any lab assistants or a proper laboratory combined with the creature’s later actions should be enough to send Victor to prison for a long time.

My name is Synclair Goyer and I am creating this blog site for the purpose of analyzing four novels for my English 11 class at Lehigh University. The books we will be reading are: “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, “The Shining” by Stephen King, “Maledicus” by Charles French, and “Gallows Hills” also by Charles French.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton