mostly david ephgrave

In the past few weeks, after a bit of a reading hiatus, I’ve got back into the practice of devouring books. While I’ve always been an avid (or should that be ‘David’?) reader, I tend to go through periods when - through tiredness or otherwise - I fall out of the habit. This will usually be the case when I’ve finished a book and haven’t had time to start another during daylight hours; I don’t like beginning new books at bedtime, as I’ll end up having to reread the first few pages the following day to make up for what I missed through tiredness.   It only takes a gripping novel to remind me of how addictive reading can be. It’s such a lovely feeling when you submerge yourself in a story and get lost in it. There’s little to match the pull of a great book that no sooner have you put down you're desperate to pick up. A well-written novel is a little bit like magic; how is it that hundreds of words on page after page disappear to be replaced by such vivid imagery? Yet it ...

For the first time in a good eighteen years, I’m reading a novel by Stephen King. He’s an author that - despite being widely respected and responsible for the plot-lines of countless films - I wasn’t sure if I might have grown out of, having been synonymous with my time as a teenager. For some reason, horror’s a genre that's often latched onto by people of that age; I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because you're approaching early adulthood and crave the gentle rebellion* of acting older than you actually are. Not that King solely writes horror; while his books often have a dark psychological or paranormal tinge, they’re not all as disturbing as ‘It’. They just happened to be the examples of his work I was first drawn to; devouring the likes of 'Misery', 'The Dark Half', 'The Shining', 'Pet Sematary', 'The Stand' and 'Needful Things' when I was probably younger than their target audience. The one I’m currently reading...