AJ Dunn Reads

  Fairy Tale By Stephen King  4 stars.

  The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue By V.E. Schwab 5 stars!

  Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell By Susanna Clarke 4 stars.

  The Wind Through the Keyhole By Stephen King   4 stars.

 The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower By Stephen King   5 stars!

  The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah By Stephen King   5 stars!

  The Dark Tower V: Wolves of Calla By Stephen King  4 stars.

  The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass By Stephen King   4.5 stars.

  The Green Mile By Stephen King   4 stars.

  Insomnia By Stephen King   4 stars.

  One of Us By Craig DiLouie After a plague epidemic creates a series of kids with genetic mutations, most parents who give birth to them give them up to various orphanage homes around the country, where they grow up and are educated. The majority of the populace despises these kids who have strange deformities or appear animalistic in nature. These kids are also put to work for some of the "normal" people. As a result of the misunderstandings and hatred, some of the plague kids want to rise up against it. And many of them are starting, during puberty, to exhibit powers well beyond mere deformities. After some of them are killed by the home's principal, and others are sent away to become government guinea pigs/slaves, a murder occurs and is blamed on Enoch Bryant, one of the plague kids working on a farm. The other plague kids know this is not true, and when Enoch is murdered they decide now is the time to rise up. This was an interesting book, and not exactly what I was ...

  Piranesi By Susanna Clarke Piranesi spends his days as a scientist exploring the labyrinth of rooms in the house he inhabits near the sea. A house full of statues and the bones of others Piranesi makes up names for. And with him lives the Other, a man Piranesi meets periodically and assists in his academic interests. Piranesi is at one with his home, believing it will provide what he needs and it is a place he finds solace in. Until someone else shows up and Piranesi's world and beliefs are challenged. The Other claims someone has come to kill him and to turn Piranesi mad, that the two of them must do everything they can to keep that from happening. But Piranesi has been keeping journals all his life, and when this new person starts leaving messages for Piranise, the journals become a font of knowledge about a past he cannot remember. As he puts the pieces together he realizes that what he believes is a lie and that the trust he had in the Other was unfounded. A whole other life ...

  The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands By Stephen King In this third installment of The Dark Tower series Roland, Eddie, and Susannah are trekking in search of the Dark Tower after coming together as a group. On the way they encounter a hostile robot bear and discover the Beam, which is a path leading to the city of Lud. The three are becoming mentally connected, able to hear each other's thoughts sometimes and sensing things about the world they are in and the mysteries it holds. One of these mysteries is the boy Jake,whom Roland let fall to his death in The Gunslinger . Roland's mind is coming undone since his forays into the world of Eddie and Susannah, where he saw Jake and saved him from the death Jake suffered there originally, which brought him into Roland's world to begin with. This altered reality has confused Roland's mind with conflicting voices about whether or not Jake ever existed in his world if he didn't die to begin with. The same is happening to Ja...

 The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three By Stephen King In this second installment of The Dark Tower series, Roland wakes on the beach just hours after the events in The Gunslinger . In search of the Tower, he has to draw three doors open, and "three" people to become gunslingers to aid him on his quest. Through the first door, marked The Prisoner, he find Eddie Dean, a junkie on an airplane moving cocaine into the US where he is supposed to deliver it to a crime boss. Roland enters Eddie's mind and is even able to control Eddie's body if he needs to. But Roland is sick and needs Eddie's help. When the two come to understand what is happening, they agree to help one another. Roland helps Eddie navigate the crime boss when Eddie fails to show up with the drugs because he was detained by Customs officials when he was acting suspiciously on the plane. In return, Eddie helps Roland with some medicine. When events do not go as smoothly as they would like, Eddie h...

  The Eyes of the Dragon by Stephen King This is probably King's biggest departure from his previous books other than The Gunslinger , and it has direct linkages to that book, specifically. The story follows two young princes whose father, King Roland, dies when his magician (Flagg) poisons him with a rare and deadly green sand in his wine. The logical heir is Peter who has all of the makings and commanding presence of a king. However, Flagg favors the younger brother, the jealous and easily manipulated Thomas. Flagg orchestrates the murder of the king to be blamed on Peter who is sent to prison in the Needle, a tall tower impossible to escape. Thomas is then crowned king and is guided (because he is young and afraid) by Flagg who is hell-bent on bringing destruction to the kingdom of Delain. A cast of characters all play their parts in either seeing Flagg's plan to fruition or foiling it by discovering what really happened and helping Peter to freedom. This is a fantasy story ...

The Dark Tower 1: The Gunslinger by Stephen King The first in The Dark Tower series, The Gunslinger follows the main character, Roland Deschains, through a desert wasteland of the End World in search of the man in black, who he hopes to kill, and who can point him towards the location of the Tower where he is to make his final battle. Roland comes from a wealthy and important family and became a gunslinger at the age of fourteen by besting his teacher in a bloody battle. Along the way he encounters a man brought back to life by the man in black, a woman who runs a saloon who uses him for sex in exchange for answers, and a town full of people who try to kill him. Then Roland finds a 12-year-old boy named Jake who seems to come from our contemporary world, but who had been run over by a car and killed, ending up waking in the End World. Jake has been staying in an abandoned building in the desert, and Roland takes him along on the journey, but ultimately sacrifices the boy in order ...