Apt Pupil

This book was such an emotional trip! I loved every painful twist and turn.

Another King-esque style book. And, it was great. The story is about a 13 year old boy who finds a nazi was criminal living in his own town. The boy black mails the man into telling him everything about his days running concentration camps. It turns into a relationship where hey are both trapped with secrets about one another and haunts them for the next 4 years. The story takes a few dark turns and ends in a style that King is best known for. Should you read it? yes, if you like Stephen King's view of the world (dark, it's dark and his fiction can seem real at times). He does a great job of writing point of view from the boy's angle and and can write from the POV of an 80 year old man jsut as well. Even if you don't know his writings too well read it anyhow to get a taste in a short story format.

Usually, a work by Stephen King grips me and refuses to let go- sadly, I can't say the same for this one. His usual schtick of using the gruesome for shock value is ever present, as if his strange obsession with pre-teens and sexuality, and his ever-brimming need to drop slurs just for the fun of it; But even all of these things put aside I could easily argue that this book is a hundred pages too long. The most interesting piece of the story being told is the twisted mental chess game between this wannabe Nazi child and the pathetic ex-Nazi soldier who's teetering ever close to his natural expiration date. The most fun thing is waiting for the other shoe to drop, watching two snakes bite one another, and waiting to see which dies first. But that sputters out a little over halfway, leaving a meandering story of unlikeable characters that pathetically putters out while you slowly lose interest in what you're reading. It drags from the start and crawls to the end and even the most exciting pieces are easily drowned out by how much drudgery is written in the rest.