Blood and Smoke by Stephen King

*Blood And Smoke Cd [ABRIDGED] [AUDIOBOOK]


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.


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.


*Purchaser will download one winrar file which archives a single MP3 file encoded at a high-quality 112 kbps.
Tags: audiobook, books