Oro T'onlo - King Sunny Ade & His African Beats

Advantages: Great reading
Disadvantages: You may snarl at anyone who interupts your reading.

...lives with his alcoholic father and brother, his father beats him regularly; Teddy's father was a second world war hero who went mad and injured Teddy so badly it affected his hearing and Vern is bullied by his elder brother mercilessly. One day, the boys hear that a kid their age has gone missing whilst out picking berries and they discover the location of his body. They then set out on a mission to find the body, hoping to find a few moments of fame and be thought heroes. The characters of the boys leap off the page, they are so vividly portrayed and the thoughts and feelings that they have and hide are so familiar to everyone's childhood that you can't help but be drawn in. I only wish that Stephen King had spent more time on this and made it into a full-length novel, as I am certain it would've been a bestseller. This is a story I... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Playing spot the cameo
Disadvantages: Poorly explained plot

...I taped this off TV (when it 1st aired in the UK) and missed the very start. The film was about 10 or so seconds into the titles (I assume) so if anything happened before that I missed it. Lots of people say Mark Hammill is in this but I certainly didn't see him. I did recognise cameos from Clive Barker (he wrote the Hellraiser series), John Landis (directed American Werewolf In London) and obviously Stephen King doing some really awful acting as the graveyard attendant. Alice Krige looks lovely apart from the scenes where she has the cat face or is in full alien make-up. Even with the opening titles it's never really explained very well exactly what Sleepwalkers are or where they come from. From the title sequence I assume they are catlike bipeds who live by extracting life-force from humans. I assume they live a long time and these... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful

Advantages: Great short stories, each a great novel in its own right
Disadvantages: 'The Body' is a little long

.... This story only runs to a hundred pages, but is completely riveting throughout. The tale centres of Andy Dufrense, who has been sent to Shawshank prison for killing his wife. While there he meets 'Red', and the two form a close, if rather strange, relationship. It becomes clear that Andy isn't your everyday bloke, and as the novel progresses it becomes clear that he is something special, not just in terms of intelligence but also skill and patience. After spending two decades in Shawshank, Andy takes a drastic and life-changing decision which has repurcussions far and wide. The film version of The Shawshank Redemption runs to a lengthy couple of hours, but King's novel is short and to the point, cramming in a lot of plot for not too many pages. Although I would have liked an extra fifty or so pages, the story works well in its short... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful