FA: STEPHEN KING'S BLOOD AND SMOKE

STEPHEN KING'S BLOOD AND SMOKE
Simon & Schuster Audio, 2000. CD. Read by the author.
Available only as an audiobook.
In the flip-top box. As new, unopened, shrink wrap intact.
Approximately 3.5 hours of listening.

From Library Journal
This audio-only collection, read by King, contains two
never-before-published stories, "In the Deathroom" and "1408," as well as
"Lunch at the Gotham Cafe," previously unrecorded. After King came to record
Bag of Bones, his first S. & S. title, he decided to do a linked collection.
The stories all touch on smoking, and the first printing is in a special
flip-top box suggestive of a cigarette box.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Amazon.com
Stephen King had such fun recording the epic, unabridged audio version of
his haunting novel Bag of Bones, he decided to publish the three-story
collection Blood and Smoke exclusively on audio. They're horror stories,
good and dark, loosely linked by the theme of cigarettes and a macabre
humor. The flip-top cigarette-box package is amusingly cool, too.
In the first tale, "Lunch at the Gotham Café," Steve Davis quits smoking two
days after his wife dumps him. King cleverly compares the two kinds of
withdrawal: obsession blends with emotional flatness, and you're left "with
a feeling the world has taken on a decidedly dreamy cast." Driven, Steve
meets with his wife and her lawyer at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, where
the nightmare begins. "I was pretty sure something was wrong with the maitre
d' almost as soon as I saw him," says Steve, and gothic café events soon
prove him right.

But the gory denouement actually worked better on the page, in the 1995 book
Dark Love. King's two new stories, written directly for audio, outdo the
first. In "1408," Mike Enslin, a writer who once studied with Jane Smiley,
dreamed of being a Yale Younger Poet, and "starved on the payroll of The
Village Voice," is reduced to hacking out stuff like "10 Nights in 10
Haunted Houses." For a follow-up, he visits room 1408 of the film noir-ish
Dolphin Hotel. "Five women and one man have jumped from that room's single
window, Mr. Enslin," notes the proprietor. "Twelve suicides in 68 years."
Ah, but Mike is wearing his "lucky Hawaiian shirt--it's the one with the
ghost repellent," and an unlit cigarette is tucked behind his ear.

"In the Deathroom" evokes another scary small space: a bloodstained basement
Ministry of Information in which Fletcher, a reporter who quit smoking long
ago, asks Escobar and his torturer's assistants--Ramon and a woman who
reminds Fletcher of the Bride of Frankenstein--for a last cigarette.
Fletcher recognizes the "we don't need no steenkeeng badges" cliché he's
trapped in, and is "amazed to discover that one's sense of humor ... could
function this far into a state of terror." But when Fletcher takes a drag,
"knowing he might be dead before it burned down to the filter," you'll be
tense. King's nasal, sarcastic delivery puts you right in there with his
horrified protagonists. --Tim Appelo --

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